The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

Posted June 6, 2008 

I own nine of the 24 volumes of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, any one of which would have made a scholar’s reputation for life. Even the polymath Laurence Picken, an enemy, called Needham’s work, “perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man.”

Born in 1900 into a family in which each parent called him by a different name, Needham became the kind of brilliant eccentric that only England has produced and probably no longer does. It never occurred to him that he should not abandon his laboratory work, in which he had achieved much, to spend the rest of his life on a dogged pursuit for which he had no formal qualifications. Not even his most severe critics dared suggest he was out of his depth. He loved morris dancing and old-fashioned songs and would perform either or both at any moment. He was careful to look disheveled at all times.

Originally a biochemist and embryologist, and a founder of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Needham and his wife Dorothy remain the only married couple ever elected to the Royal Society, apart from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He sustained for 50 years an affair with a Chinese woman scientist, Lu Gwei-djen, who became a coauthor, a relationship his wife endured; when he finally married Lu in 1989, after Dorothy’s death, he tastelessly remarked, “better late than never.”

A devout Christian and a lifelong leftist, Needham brought shame on himself in the early 1950s by testifying, after a visit to China, that the United States had used bacteriological weapons in the Korean War; the evidence turned out to have been staged by the Chinese with Soviet help. But this embarrassment eventually faded; he was elected Master of his Cambridge College, and died, loaded with the highest honors England can bestow on an intellectual. His work on Chinese science and technology remains highly regarded.

I knew Needham professionally for some years, and discussed with him his political fealty to Communist China from which he never substantially deviated. He called the Gang of Four the group, although the Chinese word is gang, and insisted that he believed in the sincerity of those who assured him the Americans had used bacteriological warfare in Korea. In 1987 I attended the funeral of his second wife, at which Needham howled like a wounded animal. Zhou Enlai met Needham in China in the 1940s, and Needham was not the only foreigner to fall for Zhou’s practiced blandishments.

Needham became interested in China when Lu Gwei-djen, a traditional apothecary’s daughter from Nanjing, came to his laboratory in Cambridge in 1937 to pursue her interest in Western biology. She and Needham began an affair, and her role in teaching him Chinese and introducing him to Chinese culture was considerable.

During the war, Needham, attached to the British embassy in Chongqing, the wartime capital, spent four years hard traveling through regions not occupied by the Japanese, searching for and finding evidence of China’s many firsts in technology. Along the way he met Chinese who opened his eyes to their ancient technology. After China, he spent two years in Paris helping found unesco, and then buried himself in his great Chinese project for the rest of his life.

Only at a place like Cambridge would his colleagues relieve him of all teaching and administrative duties in his original scientific discipline, to let this man, with no orthodox credentials in Chinese studies, spend the rest of his life on what had started as a hobby and became a productive mania.

For 50 years Needham strove to show that many of the world’s most vital technological discoveries were Chinese, often by many centuries. To list only a few: printing, the compass, the stirrup, the nonchoking horse or buffalo harness, gunpowder, porcelain, paper, seawalls, seismographs and the windlass, together with playing cards, mouth organs and bean curd. But what he had always in mind was this: During those centuries of technological genius, was there such a thing as Chinese science? That is, did the Chinese do experiments, use evidence, draw generalizations, and were they prepared to abandon fondly held beliefs if the evidence forced such a change?

His conclusion, unnoticed by this book’s author, Simon Winchester, was that it didn’t matter. In Volume 5.2, subtitled in vintage Needham fashion, “Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Magisteries of Gold and Immortality,” Needham approvingly quotes the American historian of Chinese science, Nathan Siiven: “It is an utter waste of time, and distracting as well, to expect any answer [to the absence of a scientific revolution in China] until the Chinese tradition has been adequately comprehended from the inside.” Needham went on to say, armed with his leftist convictions, which in this case are convincing, that “the social and economic conditions had [not] been favorable for the development of modern science in China.”

The Needham story is a fascinating and important one. Mr. Winchester, who writes about big subjects, covers the main chapters in Needham’s life. But he slides too often into what used to be called purple prose, well shown in his subtitle.
Mr. Winchester is obsessed by Needham’s interest in sex, and never misses a chance to call women pretty; not a single man’s looks are described, apart from Needham’s. There are too many repetitions and confusions—Needham seems to have learned German once, at age 10, by reading a single book, and again when he was a research student. Mr. Winchester also imagines the details of events unsupported by evidence—a meeting between Needham and Mao, which Mr. Winchester admits is based on rumor, is described in comical detail.

But that is Mr. Winchester’s well-honed style. Fortunately, he has read enough and writes well enough to tell us about a man who was extraordinary enough to almost merit the book’s subtitle. It would be better to say he unlocked some of the mysteries.

Jonathan Mirsky is a free-lance writer based in London.