The Man Who Loved China (32 page)

Whatever Mao said or did not say to Joseph Needham on that summer's day in 1972, he was dead four years later, and his successor, Deng Xiaoping, was to be bent single-mindedly on bringing China into the forefront of the modern world. And if that meant, as far as transportation was concerned, the wholesale scrapping of millions of Flying Pigeons and a nation shackled to a lifetime of pollution and traffic jams and countless miles of new roads to be built, then so be it.

 

Throughout this time there was a cascade of honors. In 1971 Needham was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy, so that now, in common only with the philosopher Karl Popper and the historian Margaret Gowing, he was a fellow of both the Academy and the Royal Society. Honorary degrees, academe's device for publicly declaring the gratitude of the intellectual community, began to be offered: Cambridge got in early, and then Brussels, Norwich, Uppsala, Toronto, Salford, the two main universities in Hong Kong, Newcastle, Chicago (the U.S. government finally giving him a visa to permit him to receive it), Hull, Wilmington (North Carolina), Surrey, and Peradeniya University (outside Kandy, in the central tea-estate hills of Sri Lanka). (The last reflected his keen interest in what was then Ceylon, when he chaired the country's University Policy Commission in 1958).

There was an oddly chilling coda to Needham's brief visit to Chicago in the spring of 1978. He had been invited to give three public lectures at Northwestern University. For his second talk he decided on the topic “Gunpowder: Its Origins and Uses.” One of those who came to hear his lecture was a wild-haired loner of a mathematician, a tragic, brilliant man named Ted Kaczynski.

A short while earlier, professors at a Chicago branch of the University of Illinois had summarily rejected a brief essay Kaczynski had written on the evils of modern society, and one mathematician there had heard him mutter, bitterly, that he would eventually “get even” with those who had spurned him. On May 24, six weeks after sitting through Needham's lecture, Kaczynski fashioned a wooden-cased explosive device made of gunpowder and match heads, and mailed it to one of the professors who had rejected him. It was intercepted, exploded, and injured a campus security guard.

There were no clues as to who was the perpetrator of the crime, and the incident marked the beginning of an extraordinary, bizarre, and frightening period in modern American history. Over the next two decades Ted Kaczynski, who lived alone in a remote shack in the mountains of Montana, went on to send waves of carefully made and ever more lethal bombs
to academics, killing three people and injuring more than twenty. The press and the FBI called him the Unabomber. He remained at large until his arrest in April 1996.

Few knew at the time that he may have initially been schooled in his deadly craft, though entirely unwittingly, by Joseph Needham. One can only wonder what would have happened—or might not have happened—had the State Department's ban on Needham remained in place, denying the Unabomber the opportunity to hear him and to learn about early Chinese techniques for the manufacture of explosives.

In addition to Needham's collection of degrees there were medals galore, to join his Order of China's Brilliant Star—which the British government still prohibited him from wearing at official functions. There were memberships and fellowships in bodies and institutes and academies from India to Denmark and China and then finally, once the State Department had relaxed its ban on his entry in 1978, from the great American organizations: the National Academy of Sciences, the American Historical Association, and the Yale Chapter of Sigma Xi.

His roving eye remained undimmed, even as he aged. There was much alarm in the mid-1970s when he became captivated by a distinguished Canadian Chinese woman, H. Y. Shih, who was a former director of the National Gallery of Canada. There was even talk of a divorce, and a marriage. Under great pressure from all his friends—including a joint attack from both Dorothy and Gwei-djen, who acted in what old Chinese families would recognize as the “concert of the concubinage”—the affair eventually fizzled, to widespread relief.

And through it all, the
book
. During the ten years of his mastership four more volumes were published—one on mechanical engineering; two on chemistry; and in 1975 the mighty 400,000-word tome that is generally reckoned the finest and most comprehensive, the famous Volume IV, Part 3,
Civil Engineering and Nautics
. Seven volumes were now out on the shelves; ten more were in the process of being written, edited, and proofread; another ten were still in Needham's overfurnished but impeccably organized mind.

And the chorus of admiration for the works was becoming ever more enthusiastic. George Steiner, the critic and public intellectual whose impri
matur was at the time perhaps more sought after than any other, remarked that in
Science and Civilisation in China
Needham had re-created a world of extraordinary density and presence:

The books could be favorably compared, wrote Steiner in a review in 1973, with
À la recherche du temps perdu
—for both “Proust and Needham have made of remembrance both an act of moral justice and of high art.”

An artist was commissioned to capture Needham's image, for a painted portrait in the Hall at Caius. Needham decided to wear his long blue Chinese gown, the color blue having been regarded in imperial days in China as recognition of a high level of achievement, matching the high level of achievement in Britain that was suggested by the portrait itself. The older portraits under which members of the college dine are of ruffled, velvet-clad divines; Needham is among the more recent, and above him in his eastern getup are stained-glass windows depicting, not people, but the actual achievements made by other Caians—a colored-glass Venn diagram, and a delicately rendered double helix of DNA, conceptualized by Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Caius College's Francis Crick.

 

Needham's retirement from the mastership came in 1976, and with it came the beginnings of a slow and steady downward spiral. For the first time Needham was beginning to realize—and, moreover, to admit—that he might not manage to cover the entirety of Chinese science within the limits of his lifetime. Perhaps, he wondered out loud, he might have bitten off more than he could chew. It was clear that he needed help—and not simply the kind of assistance that Wang Ling and Gwei-djen had been able to of
fer. He needed someone who could perhaps write an entire volume, could look after an entire topic of Chinese scientific history on his or her own.

Needham was sufficiently distinguished in 1963 to have his portrait painted in oils for the Caius College Hall three years before he was elected Master. The combination of slide rule and scholar's robe suggests his dual fascination with East and West.

Though he gritted his teeth about having to delegate, he eventually did: Francesca Bray was the first to be handed one entire subject (agricul
ture, eventually becoming Volume VI, Part 2). But T. H. Tsien's Volume V, Part 1, about paper and printing, actually came out first, in 1985, and with a note from Needham publicly admitting that in freeing himself from the burden of sole authorship, he had now reached a turning point. The project was still his—he was its architect and the builder of the first courses of brickwork. But the upperworks, parapets, dome—these would be the work of others. Life was too short for it to be otherwise.

Moreover, he had now reached a venerable stage of life. He was seventy-six when he left the Caius mastership; eighty-five, frail, and bowed when Tsien's volume on printing came out; then two years short of his ninetieth birthday, and ailing, when Francesca Bray's volume on agriculture emerged. The wisdom of years was prompting him to envisage just how the series would progress when he was no longer competent to write it, and also how it could progress when he was no longer around even to direct it.

 

According to a tradition at Gonville and Caius, those who are most intimately associated with the college will in their lifetime make use of two ancient gates built in the college walls. They would enter as undergraduates through what had been known for 700 years as the Gate of Humility; and at death, if their life had brought distinction, fame, or both, they would leave through another, more ornate and topped by a sundial. Called the Gate of Honour, it was seldom opened, and then only for momentous occasions. Joseph Needham's appointment with this second gate would now be not too long in coming, he suspected.

And yet he was content: those whom he had gathered around him in these closing years would be sure to finish everything, come what may. Cambridge University Press was in full agreement:
Science and Civilisation in China
was too bright a jewel in the publisher's crown—in Cambridge's crown, in the nation's crown—for anyone ever to entertain any thought of abandoning it.

Needham and Gwei-djen moved adroitly to ensure the lasting physical security of the vast collection of books and manuscripts they had accumulated. Needham had long before persuaded the college that two rooms were
necessary to house the project, and after a battle royal in the mid-1950s (for rooms in Oxford and Cambridge colleges are the scarcest of commodities, and one has to be of the greatest distinction to be permitted more than one), he was given the right to use both his old room, K-1, and K-2 next door. He installed Gwei-djen in the latter, their books in both. The crush of bookcases became unmanageable: it was still necessary for research assistants to be very small, the better to squeeze along the tiny corridors between these shelves.

Soon after Needham stepped down as master—being permitted as a courtesy to retain the rooms for a while—the pair amalgamated their book collections. They then formed a trust that had two aims: to keep the project going and to find a permanent home for it. The trust then underwent mitosis, remaining in existence, but joined by two sister organizations, one based in Hong Kong to raise funds for the project's home, the other in New York to seek money for the book's continued publication.

Needham and Gwei-djen began a rigorous program of shuttling to Asia, making speeches, attending dinners, jumping the hurdles and ducking through the various hoops that were the necessary rituals in persuading rich men and foundations to part with their money. Almost every time the couple went to China, they had to endure the gastronomic purgatories of banquets, often laced with awards. But Needham remained courteous and in puckish good form throughout: at one moment after he was awarded yet another plaque or medal or brooch or scroll of calligraphy, he turned to the camera crew recording the event: “All this,” he asked “—all this for
little me
?”

The couple's greatest success was with a former bicycle repairer in Cambridge, David Robinson, who had made a small fortune in the 1950s renting televisions to Britons too broke to buy them, and had then invested the resulting cash in horse racing and turned it into a very large fortune indeed. In the late 1970s he was endowing a new college at Cambridge near the University Library (and across the road from one of Britain's few Real Tennis courts), and after a meeting at dinner and a series of long conversations, he offered to give Joseph Needham's East Asian History of Science Trust a plot within the college site. He offered land—something that in the city of Cambridge was rare and precious.

On this piece of land, Robinson imagined, there would rise a building to house all of Needham's books on China, serve as headquarters for publishing the remaining twenty-odd volumes of
Science and Civilisation in China
, and allow research to be conducted on various aspects of Chinese history. And in time all this came to pass: Robinson College opened its doors in 1980, and the Needham Research Institute in 1987, just as David Robinson was coming to the end of his long and remarkable life.

The queen opened the college; her husband laid the foundation stone of the institute; and the university vice-chancellor and the Chinese ambassador were both on hand to declare the Needham Research Institute open for business.

But it was a project that had taken its toll. The financial crises attendant on its opening were profound, complicated as so often is the case by politics and competing egos. At one especially low point an anonymous donor gave sufficient money to keep the project tottering along—this turned out to be Lu Gwei-djen herself, who handed over part of her estate in Nanjing. Both she and Needham gave the titles to their houses on Owlstone Road—his at number 1, hers at 28—for the benefit of the trust. And from his personal funds (which were not inconsiderable: he was as judicious in financial matters as in his scholarly work) he paid Francesca Bray during her research for agriculture, much as he had paid Wang Ling for his help with the early volumes.