The Man Who Loved China (42 page)

¹⁷
Old-timers reported that Chongqing's rats invariably had bright red bellies; when found in hotels they would be chased away by kitchen boys who would throw vats of boiling water over them. This would scare them but not kill them. The scalding water would, however, instantly turn them bright pink, bellies, and all—a phenomenon that gave the kitchen boys an opportunity for great sport.

¹⁸
These would be made for them by specialists at the Indian Geological Survey in Calcutta from samples sent down from China.

¹⁹
The first of the thousands of figures was discovered quite accidentally by a farmworker digging a well in 1974. When Needham visited the city thirty years before, it was known for its array of architectural relics—immense city walls, huge gates, temple complexes, royal tombs, and countless tall pagodas—attesting to its greatness as Imperial China's onetime capital and—under its former name, Chang'an—as the eastern terminus of the Silk Road.

²⁰
Needham was a strong advocate of the use of power alcohol, distilled from rice, maize, or molasses, and had his truck's engine converted to employ this fuel, which he found satisfactory “even over the great mountain roads.” This was not the case with the many Chinese buses which had been converted to burn charcoal, and which would work properly only on the flat. Gasoline, though costly and difficult to come by, was made in some refineries from tung oil, or by a more complex process from pine tree roots and stumps.

²¹
Needham's diaries are positively littered with reminders of the breadth of his interests. At one point in his journey across the Red Basin of Sichuan he notes that the landscape reminded him of “Morna Moruna in Wm. of Ourob.” The cryptic reference turns out to be to a mountain in a book of high fantasy,
The Worm Ouroboros
(1922) by Eric Eddison—said to have inspired Tolkien to write
The Lord of the Rings
.

²²
By this time the century-old China Inland Mission (CIM), set up to promote the interdenominational evangelization of China by missionaries who were expected to live in as Chinese a manner as possible, had some 350 stations across the country, offering Christian hospitality to travelers like Needham. They had reached their peak in 1934, having weathered the Boxer rising and the revolution and the sundry depredations of warlordism. The Japanese war caused the CIM immense trouble, and by the time of the Communist revolution the number of stations had dipped to fewer than 100. They were eventually branded as havens for imperialist spies. The remaining missions were shut down, and the last missionaries left by way of Hong Kong in 1953.

²³
At least, they were until 1949. After the Communist revolution Alley had to keep his inclinations hidden, since they were illegal. He was compelled to return to the closet, a fate which he found vexing.

²⁴
Needham had taken Alley along for a ride to find new and safer quarters for a new Baillie School, since the Nationalists were starting to harass Shuangshipu, trying to press-gang boys into joining their battle-depleted army. In the end, and with Needham's help, Rewi Alley did find a new location in the old Gobi Desert town of Shandan. George Hogg, the English headmaster, then led the sixty children across the mountains on foot, a 600-mile epic that ranks with the achievements of Gladys Aylward in the book
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness,
which recounts her trek with similarly displaced children to an orphanage in Xi'an. George Hogg himself died of tetanus en route after cutting his toe while playing basketball with the children: he was just twenty-nine. The Canadian director Roger Spottiswoode added a sprinkling of fictional elements to the saga and turned the story into a film,
The Children of Huang Shi,
in 2008.

²⁵
Precisely why so many Chinese men were so entranced by bound feet has never been satisfactorily explained. Women's tiny lotus-shaped shoes were said to thrill some men—but most of these same men were aghast if a woman removed her shoe to display the wrecked foot inside. The so-called lotus gait of women with bound feet was also said to attract some erotic interest. Gladys Aylward, the missionary whose life was famously told in the book and film
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
, was an early campaigner against the practice: her grandfather in London had made boots for the disabled.

²⁶
His usual Chinese name, Li Yuese, had by now been augmented with two others given to him along the way—Shi Xin Dao Ren, which translates as “the Taoist of ten constellations”; and Sheng Rongzhi, which very roughly translates as “the master who is victorious over confusion.” He had the Lanzhou carvers make all three, and used them sometimes to sign his letters, causing much confusion.

²⁷
This lovely old walled town was where Rewi Alley eventually decided to move his Baillie School, down from its threatened site at Shuangshipu. George Hogg and the sixty young pupils walked where Needham had driven, reaching there eventually (though without George Hogg, who died) after much adventure and heartache—sufficient of both to fascinate Hollywood.

²⁸
Among these was Langdon Warner of Harvard, an art historian who in due course carried off twenty-six of the Dunhuang caves frescoes, and did so with such dash and swagger that he became one of Steven Spielberg's models for
Indiana Jones
.

²⁹
The Foreign Office swiftly removed Bryan from Beijing, despite his having performed so ably in 1949 during the crisis over the Communists' capture on the Yangzi of HMS
Amethyst
, and offered him instead a post in the British Embassy in Lima. They told him that because of his views he could never return to China as a diplomat. He chose instead to take early retirement. Perhaps it was as well: he had already irritated the British ambassador by complaining that bathrooms at the embassy in Beijing were designated for Chinese or non-Chinese, a form of Asian apartheid.

³⁰
Their southbound route was not without interest: on their first day they found themselves praying out loud as their truck inched carefully over a mountain pass near Zunyi so steep that the road had no fewer than seventy-two consecutive hairpin bends. A relieved Needham, attempting nonchalance, wrote later that the pale blue irises in the next valley were especially beautiful.

³¹
Three months before Needham traveled toward the front, the Japanese advance westward had been halted, decisively, at the famous battle of Kohima in the Indian state of Assam, described variously as the “Stalingrad of the East,” “Britain's Thermopylae,” and “one of the greatest battles in history.” Between April and June 1944 a small British contingent held off thousands of Japanese, the climax coming in the legendary “Battle of the Tennis Court,” hand-to-hand fighting in the gardens of the deputy commissioner's bungalow, ending on the tennis court's center line. Kohima was the most westerly point the Japanese ever attained: after June they were being relentlessly pressed back toward Tokyo, and fought like tigers as they went. In Kohima there is today a simple cross to the fallen British: “When You Go Home/Tell them of Us and Say/For your Tomorrow/We Gave our Today.”

³²
One hundred grams of the pressed juice of what is now generally known as the Indian gooseberry provides almost one full gram of vitamin C, and so not surprisingly it is widely available at health-food stores.

³³
Lady Seymour had returned from her self-imposed wartime exile in Wiltshire to join her husband once the peace was signed and it was deemed safe for her to be back in Chongqing.

³⁴
Until February 1945 the body was tentatively known as UNECO. During Needham's visit to the United States in February 1945 he argued vociferously for the inclusion of science in its responsibilities, and handwrote a memo suggesting that it be called UNESCO instead. This was formally agreed on in November.

³⁵
Except for the roiling civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists, which ended in 1949 with victory for Mao and Zhou Enlai.

³⁶
Two other works traditionally rival the
Gujin tushu jicheng
for length and magnificence. The
Yongle dadien
,
The Great Canon of the Yongle Emperor's Era
, was produced in the fifteenth century, in early Ming times, and had 11,000 manuscript volumes, of which only a few hundred survive, most held privately; and the
Siku Quanshu
,
The Complete Books of the Four Imperial Repositories
, was produced by the Manchus of the mid-Qing dynasty and exists in no fewer than 36,000 volumes. The Forbidden City's original, repaginated into 1,500 leather-bound volumes, is in the great National Museum in Taipei, with a photographic reprint at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, and with condensed facsimile copies—and a CD-ROM edition—available for considerable sums in folding money.

³⁷
His favored use of this elderly typewriter led to the accidental birth of a new Needham system of Chinese transliteration. Whenever he tried to type a word with an aspirated
h
—a word like
Ch'iu
—he found that his apostrophe would not work, and so he represented the aspirate with a double
h—Chhiu
. This made its way into print, and remained the case in all volumes of
Science and Civilisation in China
, all editors assuming that it was a deliberate invention of Needham's rather than a shortcut necessitated by a problem of writing mechanics.

³⁸
This has been a very popular commodity among rich Chinese for centuries; it became fashionable in the fourteenth century: records show that particularly impressive orders for quantities of this “thick but soft” aromatic paper were issued in 1393. Large sheets, two feet by three feet, were made for general use at court; smaller and better-quality sheets, just three inches square, were designed for the more sensitive and economically shaped bottoms of the imperial family. Records show that the first manufacture of paper for such purposes took place in the sixth century.

^39
39
Needham's known interest in the erotic tempted more than a few letter writers to make contact. One communication, in the spring of 1948, came from Mr. P. Ye, who described himself as a '38-year-old virgin male” from Fudan University in Shanghai. He was concerned that because of 'sexual radiation” his eyelids oscillated whenever he masturbated, as he did five times daily. He wrote a lengthy technical inquiry, but its arrival was delayed, mainly because he had addressed it to 'Dr. Joseph Needham, Cambridge University, London.”

⁴⁰
A series of separate monographs also emerged from the overmatter. Among them were
The Great Astronomical Clocks of Mediaeval China
, published in 1960;
The Pre-Natal History of the Steam-Engine
in 1962; and, most commercially successful of all (not least because of its clever title),
Celestial Lancets: A History of Acupuncture
.

⁴¹
The deliciously eccentric British architect—always dressed in breeches and canary-yellow socks—who created, among other magical places, the Welsh fantasy village of Portmeirion, and advised Needham on building techniques.

⁴²
So close were the men that Needham dedicated the first of the two volumes of
Science and Civilisation in China
devoted to military technology—Volume V, Part 6—to Zhou, for his role as “a constant encourager of this project.”

⁴³
Other research using live biological agents was also conducted in eight American cities between 1950 and 1966, according to testimony given before a Senate committee in 1976—a disclosure that shocked most of America at the time and led to widespread popular revulsion against biological weapons generally, and a widespread reaffirmation of a decision by President Nixon in 1972 to ban the possession of such weapons by the United States.

⁴⁴
Needham's letters and other papers relating to the commission are preserved not in the Cambridge University archives, but, in consideration of the sensitivity of the topic of germ warfare, in the rather more secure surroundings of London's Imperial War Museum.

⁴⁵
By chance my own copy of Joseph Needham's book
Science Outpost
, which recounts his four wartime years in China, once belonged to Gene Weltfish. He had inscribed it, “Gene! With love from Joseph, Jan. 1949. Write me how you like it.” Senator McCarthy and the regents of Columbia would doubtless have found its possession a useful piece of additional evidence for their crusade.

⁴⁶
A strawberry-growing relative of Punnett's invented the small wooden basket now known, shorn of its terminal
t
, as a punnet.

⁴⁷
There is still much resistance to the use of the pinyin name
Beijing
for the current Chinese capital. Not only are very few outsiders able to pronounce the word accurately; its use also flies in the face of the more general use in English of “English” names or pronunciations for distant cities or countries. Roma is called Rome, Deutschland is called Germany, Suomi is called Finland, and Zhongguo is called China. Many who accept this logic would like
Peking
returned to common currency, but doubt that it will ever happen.