The Man Who Loved China (41 page)

¹
There were many distinguished male researchers, too—among them the celebrated geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, whose line from the famous essay “On Being the Right Size” still haunts many. He was describing what happens when a variety of mammals of different sizes are dropped down a mineshaft: “A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”

²
Needham's renowned ownership of Campbell's mighty car led to a reported encounter with Chairman Mao in the 1960s which, if it did indeed take place, was to have an enormous impact on Chinese society and, incidentally, on global warming. The details of the conversation will appear later in this book.

³
The topic intrigued Dorothy Needham for the rest of her life. Her only book, devoted entirely to muscle movement, was published when she was seventy-six. It was called
Machina Carnis
, roughly translated as
The Meat Machine
.

⁴
Dorothy Needham was made a fellow seven years later—giving the Needhams the great distinction of being the only husband-and-wife team to be accorded the honor, aside from the honorific appointments of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

⁵
The wife of Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect best known for creating the fantasy town of Portmeirion in north Wales (where the cult television series
The Prisoner
was filmed in the 1960s).

⁶
For twenty years, beginning in 1937, this remarkable organization tallied the ordinary details of British life, using volunteers to perform such mundane tasks as asking people what they kept in their trouser pockets, surreptitiously noting down the rituals of working-class courtship, and reading messages written on banknotes.

⁷
There was a period during the Cultural Revolution when it was officially deemed more truly proletarian and patriotic to have just a single given name. A Chinese with an abbreviated name like Chen Hong or Li Guan suggests the bearer was quite probably born during the late 1960s, with parents who obeyed the instructions of their local Red Guards.

⁸
To add a further layer of complexity: Needham wrote his dictionary using the venerable Wade-Giles system of transliterating Chinese pronounciation into English. The modern pinyin system is very different—so the sound for electricity is not
tien
, as Needham had it, but
dian
, though in the same fourth tone; and
tien
, heaven, becomes
tian
, as in the usual contemporary spelling of the Beijing landmark Tiananmen Square.

⁹
The Japanese began softening-up operations in June, dropping experimental bombs on the Shanghai docks, and in the process rudely delaying Gwei-djen's departure for London. It was only thanks to a passing British destroyer that stopped and gave her a ride down the estuary that she made it to her steamer at all: she was drenched with spray from the Zeros' attacks.

¹⁰
Knatchbull-Hugessen is most fondly remembered for having been the victim, when later appointed British ambassador to Turkey, of the “Cicero affair,” in which his Albanian valet stole the keys to the embassy safe from his cast-off trousers. Defenders claimed that the injuries he suffered in Shanghai had rendered him so careless and forgetful. The obituary writer for the
Times
felt there was a deeper problem. The ambassador's career had been a successful one, said its anonymous author, because Knatchbull-Hugessen “was fortunate in never having had to meet a situation demanding more of him than he had to offer.” Moreover, “it was also a definite advantage that he had a mind which, while agile and resourceful, instinctively eschewed complexities and so saved him from the pitfalls which, especially in dealings with clever foreigners, beset the path of the overingenious intellectual.”

¹¹
One of the half-crown paperbacks put out by the club in 1939 was the story of the Levellers, a seventeenth-century grassroots political movement. The author was “Henry Holorenshaw”—a nom de plume, it later turned out, for Joseph Needham (who also wrote a foreword under his own name, praising “this little book of my friend, Mr. Holorenshaw.”)

¹²
Samuel Wells Williams, a New Yorker with a lifelong fascination with the East, was the interpreter who in 1853 traveled to Japan with Admiral Perry, the American who helped bring about the end of the shogunate, the restoration of the emperor, and the beginnings of Japan's modernization.

¹³
As indeed this one was. On chapter 3 of Needham's
Science and Civilisation in China
, Volume VI, Part I,
Botany
, there appears the first of many references to grafting techniques, starting with a description from the thirteenth century of how a Chinese gardener would make a graft on a red orange tree.

¹⁴
This principle had allowed the subjects of certain foreign imperial powers—Britain, France, Italy, and the United States among them—to be considered answerable only to the judicial systems of their home countries while living and working in China. British vessels operating on the Yangzi, for example, were subject not to Chinese laws but to the same laws that operated on the Thames or in the Bristol Channel. An American accused of assault in a bar in Shanghai would be judged by an American court, since Chinese justice was considered peculiar and suited only to Chinese citizens.

¹⁵
Winning a Cambridge “Blue”—for competing against Oxford in a sport—was often as important a qualification as an academic degree. George Hogg, an old China hand, wrote once of his surprise in learning that “a Double Blue is a necessary qualification for the best colonial posts, while two college game colours (squash rackets acceptable as one) will do for the Indian Civil Service.” An Oxford Blue, awarded to sportsmen competing against Cambridge, would of course have the same value.

¹⁶
One of the other guests, with whom he briefly shared quarters, was the brilliant Dutch sinologist and novelist Robert van Gulik, who was stationed in Chongqing as counsellor at the Netherlands embassy. Van Gulik's main claim to fame was a series of Chinese detective novels centered on the exploits of a seventh-century magistrate, Judge Dee. Needham and van Gulik became firm friends, their relationship cemented by their vast intelligences, and a shared interest in erotica.