The Man Who Loved China (10 page)

Needham gazed out of the aircraft windows, far too excited to sleep. Range after range of gigantic mountains, glaciers uncoiling between them, rose up before and beneath him, their sharp peaks reaching closer and closer to the plane's underbelly as the pilot tried frantically, by making enormous spirals, to reach a safe altitude. The altimeter read 17,000 feet by the time they reached the top of the ranges, and everyone aboard was cold and gasping for breath.

He tried to write a poem to celebrate, but (perhaps rather happily for his readers) there was too little oxygen in the cabin, and his mind wandered. Instead he read some Lucretius, complaining in the margins about the translation. And then the frontier was crossed, and the plane began its slow descent over the deeply incised valleys of the Salween and Mekong rivers, for Yunnan.

This was the moment he had so long anticipated. It was Wednesday afternoon, teatime, on February 24, 1943; and just now, less than a score of miles ahead of the plane, all China waited for him.

On Oranges

I
t was the China of which he had dreamed.

He stepped off the plane at Kunming's military airstrip into a crisp early spring afternoon, the air cold but the sun warm, to be met by the British vice-consul and Pratt, the King's Messenger. He was driven off to the city across a fertile plateau along roads lined with poplars and irrigation ditches and through hamlets with small cottages built of yellow mud brick, their roofs blue-tiled and with gently upturned gables and ornamental finials.

By the time he reached the ornate buildings of the consulate he was
immediately and uncontrollably happy. He fancied that the consul general looked like H. G. Wells, and the architecture was instantly delightful. He was also pleased to note that a grove of bamboos had been judiciously planted outside his bedroom window; and he was particularly overjoyed when he realized that the consulate's corps of venerable retainers—“said to be promoted coolies, solemn but nice”—actually seemed to understand his painstakingly learned spoken Chinese. The consul, Alwyn Ogden, was astonished at his ability, too, and highly impressed.

Needham spent the late afternoon unpacking, listening to the crows cawing in the consulate garden, and watching the sun inch down over the far Tibetan hills, imagining himself—as he wrote the next morning in a long letter to his old friend Margaret Mead, the anthropologist—in the Cambridgeshire village of Duxford, in the garden of the local vicarage. Throughout his subsequent life in China he would make comparisons like this, comparing obscure places in Yunnan and Hubei and Xinjiang to beloved, cozy places in the country he had left behind, or else to spots—usually in either America or France—that he especially liked. It comforted him to do so: despite his goading wanderlust he was often overwhelmed by waves of introspection and homesickness. In any case he probably suspected that the conceit added some sense of fine romance to his writings—though some of his comparisons do seem improbable: in comparing the city of Kunming to the village of Duxford he was likening a city of almost 1 million to a rural community of no more than sixty.

He recorded with fine detail his impressions of his first thirty-six hours in China, in letters to Margaret Mead and Lu Gwei-djen in America and to Dorothy—who was working in the biochemical laboratory in Cambridge. He told them all how he went for a stroll that first evening—the hills on the skyline in all directions seeming to him like the west of Scotland—and how he was charmed by the friendliness of everyone he met. People in the street smiled at him. The gardeners “in their little mongol caps” were all “amiable.” The sentry at the gate of Yunnan University may have carried a rifle with a fixed bayonet, but was “pleased to pass the time of day.” And he was charmed to be able to watch a circle of about 100 soldiers sitting on a lawn, looking on while a pair of them practiced kickboxing to the tune of a thin bamboo pipe:

He had evidently stopped to watch this old gardener, and not just because of the man's exotic appearance. He realized that in following as closely as he could the manner in which the man was splicing, tying, and grafting the plum tree, he was actually witnessing something rather important. He was watching a performance—the carrying out of a technique, a craft, a science—that was very, very different from the performance of similar techniques he remembered at home.

Later he recalled his father working on the single apple tree that grew in the back garden of the family house in London—and if he closed his eyes he could see just what his father had done one long-ago summer day when he himself was just a child, while trying to top-graft this tree to help make it stronger and bear more fruit. The more he thought back, the more he realized that what his father had done was wholly unlike what this Chinese gardener was doing here in Kunming. Perhaps, of course, the difference was simply because the family tree had been apple, and this one was plum. But he doubted it. More probably it was because
in China they did things differently
.

A further thought struck him. Perhaps the Chinese not only did their grafting differently but may have done this different kind of grafting very much earlier than anyone in Europe had done anything like it. Perhaps this old man's technique was thousands of years old. Further still, quite possibly Needham could prove it was thousands of years old by researching old Chinese books on botany—which of course he could now read with ease. He could hunt down any references to fruit grafting in ancient times, and then compare these accounts with published histories of gardening in the English language.

So he made a quick penciled note about the precise nature of this gardener's technique, and a reminder to check the ancient texts. This notation
is historically important—it represents the very first piece of information that Joseph Needham ever recorded with the specific intent of one day putting it into the book he was thinking of writing. If this gardening technique was different, then maybe he would have discovered a vital piece of information showing that Chinese horticulture had an antiquity far greater than anyone in the West supposed.

He recalled once reading, in Cambridge, a treatise by the American missionary S. Wells Williams,
¹²
which roundly declared: “Botany, in the scientific sense of the word, is wholly unknown to the Chinese.” Such a statement, Needham was to write later, “could only have been made by one of a generation totally ignorant of the history and pre-history of science.” Needham felt he needed to write his new book largely to overcome ignorance like this, and to purge the western world of prejudices against the Chinese that were based on such a wholesale lack of knowledge and understanding. Should a book ever be published, then observations like this, and the scores of others he now knew he would make—for this was only his first day in China, and he probably had chalked up one discovery already—would be sure to be included.
¹³

Moreover, what Needham had achieved and planned while observing this gardener—watching his peculiarly Chinese uniqueness, noting down the details of his craft, researching the ancient Chinese literature on the subject, and then comparing these writings with similar literature from the rest of the world—was an investigatory technique he could apply with equal validity across the board. Everything he was about to see—how a Chinese farmer plowed, how a Chinese bridge was built, how iron was smelted in China, what pills a Chinese doctor handed out, which kinds of
kites were to be found in a Chinese playground, what a Chinese siege cannon looked like, how a dam, a brick, a haystack, or a harness was built in China—was useful to him. He could see and note down all these things while he was performing his official tasks for the British government. There would in any case be plenty of overlap between his official duties of helping out the beleaguered Chinese universities, and his personal research. He could spend each day looking, searching, noting; he could spend each night reading; he would examine the foreign literature when he got home—and then, perhaps, there might well be enough material for a book.

And so even before he had reached his ultimate destination, Chongqing, the nation's capital, where his billet—the British embassy—was sited, he was fired up with inquisitorial energy. His experience watching the gardener persuaded him to take advantage of his few days of rest in Kunming to scour the city and its hinterland for ideas—and he discovered them in abundance, together with much that astonished him, in areas of technology that were both prosaic and abstruse. The Chinese, he kept discovering again and again, had the longest imaginable history of invention, creation, and the generation of new ideas.

He found and sketched, for instance, a bucket dredger, where coolies—his word—were winding up water from a deep ditch by hand. He ferreted out a local cytologist and discussed what he knew about British cell research. He went down local caves and found to his amazement scores of the finest measuring machines and scales squirreled away there, safe from bombings, with men in white coats patiently titrating and calibrating and weighing with Zeiss lenses and Griffin and Tatlock scales, hundreds of feet below ground. He was then even more astonished to find that Chinese scientists had a fathomless capacity for “make-do-and-mend”: he noted that even in the “sylvan surroundings” of Yunnan, some students at the crystal physics laboratory were building their own radio valves, and others were making quartz crystals for receivers. Perhaps most surprising of all, technicians in one physics building were making their own microscopes and telescopes from scratch, grinding the lenses to the correctly calculated shape from blocks of raw optical glass.

On another day in Kunming he asked for and was given a history of Chinese mathematics from Dr. Hua, a man whose brilliance prompted
Needham to describe him as the “Chinese Ramanujan”—until to his momentary embarrassment he discovered that Dr. Hua, like the legendary Indian scholar, had worked in Cambridge alongside G. H. Hardy, Trinity's world-famous mathematics professor, and the two men knew each other well.

He visited a laboratory doing work on antimalarial and antidysentery drugs, and spent one entire lunch being talked to about “plant growth hormones, cathode ray oscillographs, egg respiration and what have you.” Then that same evening he gave a talk on what he knew about the history of Chinese science, later noting with evident pleasure “the extraordinary good looks of the Chinese [that] came out remarkably as they were sitting round the fire. I like their long gowns, giving a monastic look to the scene, and they put their hands in their sleeves in a quiet way which is nice.”

The very next day he decided to have a scholar's robe made for himself. The local tailors seldom had to fashion clothing for a
lao wai
, a foreigner, and they were astonished at Needham's height, which overtopped the average Chinese client by a foot at the very least. He decided on blue silk, with a black cotton lining and a lighter blue heavy silk for trim and enormous cuffs at the end of the baggy sleeves where he might hide his hands, as he had already seen Chinese merchants doing. The colors he chose denoted academia and thoughtfulness, the cutter told him.

He was fascinated by the entire two-day process—not least by the arcane system of Chinese measurement which tailors still used (and which the older ones still use today), applying as it did such units as the
duan
, the
cun
, the
chi
, and the
zhang
. They then calculated the length of the silks required and the costs—first on a pocket abacus, and then as confirmation on a desktop machine, a venerable contraption of heavy teak spheroids and worn brass fixtures, which under the clerk's fast-flying fingers whirred like clockwork.

Needham was entranced. Here, again, was a shining example of a Chinese invention that, he imagined, probably predated any calculating engine made in the West. He sketched the machine in the tailor's shop: it was made of twelve rods, each divided by a bar into a short upper part and a longer lower one, with two flattened teak balls on each upper part, five on each lower part, and everything enclosed in a teak frame. The Chinese name for
the contraption was
suan-pan
, a calculating plate;
wu zhu suan pan
, a five-ball plate. The idea, the shopkeeper added, was probably as ancient as the hills.

Soon after his arrival in China, Needham had a local tailor make a scholar's robe for him, in blue silk with contrasting pale blue cuffs. By 1946 it was showing the effect of the rigors of his travels.