Joseph Needham was one of those extraordinary persons whose interests and accomplishments never ceased to astonish others. In his new biography The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester masterfully portrays the brilliant Cambridge scientist, an ardent advocate of nudism, avid folk dancer, accordion player, chain-smoking churchgoer, prodigious womanizer whose wife and mistress remained friends for over five decades, and a fearless adventurer, whose greatest accomplishment was “to displace the dismissive ignorance with which China had long been viewed �C to amend it first to a widespread sympathetic understanding and then… with a sense of respect, amazement and awe”. Needham’s life-long passion and decades of research in and outside China gave rise a masterpiece called Science and Civilization in China, “universally acknowledged to be the greatest work of explanation of the Middle Kingdom that has yet been created in western history”.
Needham was the product of a “spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage” of a “flame-haired Irishwoman” prone to erratic mood swings and spending binges, and a “steady, unexciting” resolutely bourgeois London doctor. It was a friend of his father’s that introduced Needham, at the age of nine, to the medical and surgical sphere, and though young Needham had decided he would never be a surgeon, as a teenager he often worked in the operating theater as an assistant to his father. Needham then attended Cambridge University, where, from a shy, introspective young man he was transformed into an outgoing, seductive polymath, making “the most of his stature and studious good looks”. He successfully completed his degree in biochemistry and stayed on at Cambridge to become a full-fledged fellow at the age of 24. That same year he also married Dorothy “Dothi” Moyle, a fellow Cambridge scientist who specialized in the chemistry of muscles. They were the first husband wife team to be named Royal Society fellows. Before taking their vows both had decided that theirs was to be a “thoroughly modern marriage” and they would “not be hobbled by the tedious, irksome, and thoroughly bourgeois demands of sexual fidelity”. Thus, when Joseph Needham began a romance with a beautiful, brilliant Chinese graduate student, Lu Gwei-djen, an affair that lasted more than 50 years, Dorothy was “entirely complaisant”, the wife and mistress remaining friends for over five decades, even as the prodigious womanizer Needham carried on with other women in different countries.
It was Lu Gwei-djen who sparked Needham’s fascination with China. In 1943, he was asked by the British government to go as a diplomat to China, ostensibly to “renew and extend the cultural bonds between the British and Chinese peoples”, to visit the “learned institutions” in China, and to facilitate the transfer of textbooks, laboratory equipment, and other supplies to the Chinese. He landed in Chongqing, the temporary capital of “free China” in February 1943 and stayed until 1946. During his time in China, all while providing textbooks, equipment and overall good cheer to struggling Chinese scientists, Joseph Needham also researched Chinese scientific history, and its remarkable inventions. He embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to China’s farthest frontiers. They included a trip to Dunhuang caves in Xinjiang, where the Diamond Sutra, the world’s first woodblock printed book (868 A.D.) had been discovered, and to Dujiangyan, the site of a stupendous diversion dam, built around 250 B.C. He also travelled southwest to Burmese border, and southeast, to Fujian province, narrowly escaping the Japanese. He encountered and befriended a great number of notable Chinese scientists, scholars, and politicians, including Zhou Enlai. He used his time in Chongqing and his extensive travels to gather the materials, books and manuscripts and to keep notes that would eventually culminate in the publication of his life’s work, Science and Civilization in China.
In 1946, after a two year spell at UNESCO, Needham had come back to Cambridge to begin cataloguing and organizing his findings. In 1954, published the first volume of Science and Civilization in China, describing the country’s long and astounding history of invention and technology. He provided evidence that the Chinese created hundred’s of mankind’s most familiar and significant innovations �C including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges and even perfumed toilet paper �C often centuries before the rest of the world. Needham not only chronicled renowned Chinese innovations, but also fondly described the small scale technologies and innovations, including wheelbarrows, fishing reels, the umbrella, the spinning wheel, the kite, fine porcelain, playing cards, and the game of chess. The first volume of his opus, quickly turned into seven, some co-authored with Lu Gwei-djen and other brilliant collaborators such as the Chinese scientist ...
Introduction of author
Simon Winchester is the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, Krakatoa, and A Crack in the Edge of the World. Each of these has been a New York Times bestseller and has appeared on numerous best and notable lists. Mr. Winchester was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by HM The Queen in 2006. He lives in western Massachusetts.
