The Man Who Loved China (24 page)

Without any warning a large number of wooden tea chests and still more crates and cartons began to arrive at the Caius porters' lodge—and each one held a vast quantity of even rarer and more obscure papers and books, not one of them collected by Needham or by anyone especially familiar to him. They were, it turned out, a gift.

The boxes had all come from a man Needham had met in China but had almost discounted at the time and had quite forgotten since his return. He was a paleometeorologist, Dr. Zhu Kezhen, who in 1944 was president of Zhejiang University, called the “Cambridge of the East.” As with so many Chinese universities, the war had obliged Zhejiang to move from its site near Shanghai to a temporary home in the grimy, impoverished town of Zunyi, in China's farther west.

Dr. Zhu, who had a particular interest in the climatic history of China, had been doing his level best to maintain Zhejiang's national reputation—and part of his plan was to ask for a visit from Joseph Needham of the British embassy, who might supply British and American textbooks and equipment. Yet he evidently had made little impression on Needham, who mentions him only briefly in his contemporaneous notes, marking him down simply as “China's leading meteorologist” and reporting no special conversations or memories.

Needham did tell Dr. Zhu that he planned to write a history of Chinese contributions to world civilization, but that was all. Needham's diaries
note that he was actually much more captivated by researchers at Zhejiang who were doing work on the mechanics of silk, color-pattern inheritance in ladybirds, the presence of flavonoids in jujubes, and the high levels of ascorbic acid in the local Chinese rose hip.

He had no inkling of the enormous impression he made on Dr. Zhu—who seemed, as he later recalled, a rather taciturn and distant man. Zhu, however, had thought deeply about Needham's plan to write a book and realized that he could be in a unique position to help.

So as soon as Needham had returned to England, and by the time the Japanese had scurried home and the political and military situation in China became somewhat more stable,
³⁵
Dr. Zhu started collecting books and papers for him, packing them securely, and sending them to Cambridge by ship.

One particular item Zhu sent turned out to be of extraordinary value, in terms of both money and of usefulness. It was a complete copy of an edition of 1888 of what was then and remains today perhaps the largest book in the world: the imperial Chinese encyclopedia,
Kuchin Tu-shu Chi-cheng
(
Gujin tushu jicheng
, in pinyin) or
The Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings of Ancient and Modern Times
. This was a distillation—or rather a conflation, since nothing seems to have been left out—of everything that was known to the greatest minds of the capital city of the Celestial Empire. It was the sum, in other words, of all Chinese knowledge.

The book
³⁶
had been commissioned in 1700 by the Kangxi emperor—one of the earliest of the Qing emperors, and, with his reign of sixty-one
years, the longest-serving in all Chinese history. It took its authors twenty-six years to complete, and when first published, having been printed with movable bronze type at the Peking Imperial Printing House, it reputedly contained 10,000 volumes and 170 million characters.

The definition of
volume
was then somewhat different from our own—the word
section
or
fascicle
might be more appropriate. The edition Needham received, which was created a century and a half after the first (and which, because of its fragility, is now packed away in boxes in Needham's archive), comprised very nearly 2,000 books: the edition currently at the Library of Congress in Washington sports almost 6,000. Also, the word
anthology
might describe the work most accurately—it is not alphabetical but topical, and it is essentially a collection of everything important that had ever been written down in Chinese. Its usefulness to Needham was paramount. His debt to Dr. Zhu turned out, as he later readily admitted, to be incalculable.

Once the books were in place and the rooms more or less in shape, a routine was soon established, as well as a commute. Joseph and Dorothy owned a house a little more than a mile away from the college, at 1 Owlstone Road. When Lu Gwei-djen returned from Paris in 1957 she would live a few yards away from them on the same street, at number 28, conveniently for all purposes. The walk between home and college—or the drive; Needham loved driving, and at irrationally high speeds—was fantastically pretty: in springtime and in summer the half hour it took to cross the lawns of King's College, to stroll under the chestnuts beside the Backs, to pass down along the Cam by way of Newnham Road, and, finally, to cut through the rabbit warren of Edwardian houses to Owlstone Road, presented as perfect a cross section of Cambridge's loveliness as any tourist might desire.

Although Needham kept a vast amount of Chinese paraphernalia at home, most of the work on the great project was accomplished in his rooms at Caius. Day after day he and Dorothy left early each morning—if the weather was dry, going by one of several footpaths across Coe Fen; if it was drizzling, keeping to the streets and crossing the Cam by the Silver Street Bridge—then walking together first to Dorothy's biochemistry department on Tennis Court Road. Then Joseph would finally press on alone
along King's Parade and to the porter's lodge of Caius. If he was for some reason on his own, and the weather was fine, he rode his bicycle.

He cut an impressive figure, at least in part because he was so tall and broad, built like a bear. He invariably wore a dark suit, pin-striped, double-breasted, rumpled. The collar of his shirt, freshly laundered, was nevertheless always disarranged; his tie was askew; and his shoes, though clean, were scuffed, the laces frequently broken and retied. He kept his brown tortoiseshell glasses well polished, however. He parted his thick hair on the right, and was careful always to have it well brushed, though it was usually just a little too long.

There was a dusting of ash on his lap, but during the composing of the book he set a firm rule: he would take no cheroot or cigarette before noon. He was fiercely disciplined in this: as the morning wore on he would peer anxiously at the college clock—with one cylinder of tobacco already out on the desk, and his box of Swan Vestas at the ready—and the moment it struck twelve he would light up, and then smoke like industrial Pittsburgh for the rest of the day. He kept the cigarette in his mouth all the while, his head wreathed in ribbons of curling blue.

Once in K-1 he sank into a brown study, and remained there, stolid and undisturbable, for hour upon Chinese hour. Only Wang Ling could interrupt his reverie, to pass him a paper, look up a reference, or translate one of the finer points that no dictionary or encyclopedia could settle. Once started each morning, Needham worked nonstop, often until long after dark.

He employed neither a typist nor a secretary. He typed everything himself on one of his Royal typewriters—either a black portable, which he carried in its venerable case, covered with airline stickers; or a large Royal desk machine
³⁷
with an extra-wide carriage. He used only two fingers, and yet managed to type at a fantastic speed (as many two-finger typists myste
riously do). His typing was always very accurate; his first script was always his final draft, and it was from these drafts that the Cambridge University Press prepared its galleys (these, by contrast, usually required many changes—edits which he often performed in his head, while lying awake in bed).

Needham working in K-1, the room in Caius College, Cambridge, that he occupied for almost seventy years. Later he also took the room next door, now occupied by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

He did not take kindly to interruption, and though generally a polite and thoughtful man, could be crashingly rude if disturbed. Once when his old friend Julian Huxley, who had been the first director general of UNESCO, telephoned from the porter's lodge to announce that he had arrived for a visit, Needham said, with glacial courtesy, “I am frightfully busy. You come without an appointment, so I am afraid I cannot see you.” Huxley promptly returned to London, his day entirely wasted.

On another occasion Sir Ronald Fisher, an eminent geneticist, knocked on the door of K-1, opened it without waiting for a response, and was
halfway in when Needham barked out “I'm frightfully busy” and went on hammering away at the machine. Fisher tried to explain that he had come simply to say that yes, as Needham had asked at breakfast that morning, a pair of visitors from China could indeed make use of Fisher's college rooms for the coming weekend. He raised his voice. No response. Then he shouted to Needham over the clattering din of the typewriter, “You asked me, and I say ‘Yes.'” And then he left abruptly. Needham, despite having been granted a favor, never even bothered to look up.

On one occasion he relented, and happily so, since the interruption proved of great benefit. A stranger telephoned, explaining that he had just arrived from France, and badly needed a reprint of a paper he had seen mentioned in Needham's trilogy
Chemical Embryology
. Needham barked at him politely, telling him he had no such reprint and would he kindly not disturb him any further?

But the man persisted, inviting Needham to lunch, pleading once again that he had come all the way from France. And so Needham, who was something of a trencherman, agreed. The man then described how making use of an obscure embryological point mentioned in the trilogy had completely transformed his egg-producing business in France. And then he did what he had really come to Cambridge for—he handed Needham a check for an enormous sum of money.

Needham seldom dined in the college, preferring to work through the dinner hour and then go home late. Christopher Brooke, a prominent medievalist who was a junior don when Needham was beginning his work on China, recalls that on those few occasions when Needham did turn up in Hall he would forcefully quiz his dinnertime colleagues on matters that seemed relevant to his book, and would carefully jot the answers down on the backs of menu cards and on paper napkins. The younger men liked talking to him: they found him rum, not dangerous. And they knew how he worked, really worked, and that he was often exhausted as a result. Once he flopped down into one of the chairs at the high table right beside the young, nervous Brooke, declaring simply: “Make amusing conversation to me: I'm really very tired.”

Wang Ling recounted a story about how preoccupied his boss became when he was in the middle of working nonstop:

Despite Needham's occasional air of autocratic disdain, people were eternally eager to help him, support him, and surround him with care. He employed a woman whom he called Auntie Violet to make him breakfast and tea: she worked for him, buttering the crumpets he liked to toast on his electric fire, until she was well over ninety. And once it was realized that even a Stakhanovite like Needham could be tempted to join others for afternoon tea, a variety of distinguished men and women, crumpet lovers and tea drinkers all, would stop by to dine informally with him, often memorably.

One professor stopped in to talk about rain gauges—whereupon Needham discovered for him, quite accidentally, a reference to what turned out to be the first rain gauge ever made, in a book on mathematics in the Yuan dynasty. During a teatime conversation about sternpost rudders with a team of acknowledged experts on shipbuilding from London, Needham turned out to know far more about the subject than any of the specialists. They returned to the Maritime Museum in Greenwich chastened, rubbing their eyes in astonishment both at the marvels of ancient China and, in
comparison with Needham, their own newly revealed ignorance. And a Russian scientist arrived for tea, and asked, just in passing, if Needham knew who had translated one of the Russian's own books, published in Moscow, into English—whereupon Needham reached around and fished the very book out of his shelves. He looked at it and nodded, remarking that, yes, the title did sound familiar. Yes, he said again, after thinking for a few more moments—he himself had actually been the translator, when he was an undergraduate. But he doubted that he could repeat the feat: his Russian was not so good today—though his German, Greek, French, and Italian, and of course his Chinese, were still well-nigh impeccable.