Joseph Needham is one of those extraordinary characters whose life was so large and sprawling that it needs first to be condensed into a list. He was a scientist, polyglot, traveler, diplomat, Christian, socialist, exponent of free love, nudist, morris dancer and Sinophile. All these aspects of Needham’s life are explored in Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book and Compass, but it is Sinophilia that animates every page. The title refers to Francis Bacon’s choice of the three inventions (all Chinese) that changed the world. However, the American title — The Man Who Loved China — better describes the thrust of the book.
To a certain school of Western thought, China has long been a kind of intellectual Shangri-la, although rather than immortality the gift of this Oriental utopia is invention: it’s the place where every idea was born. It’s a tradition that trails a sometimes dubious reputation, including as it does figures such as Gavin Menzies, the author of popular history books that claim the Chinese discovered the New World and inspired the European Renaissance. Such arguments, according to one academic, are “the historical equivalent of stories about Elvis Presley in [a supermarket].”
Needham also tended to see Chinese footprints in every aspect of modernity, but he is not so easily dismissed. His academic credentials were dauntingly impressive. A brilliant Cambridge biochemist, he remains one of the very few people to have been a fellow of both the Royal Society and the British Academy, and before he died the only living person to hold, in addition to these titles, that of Companion of Honour. As one of the founding officials, he was also the man who literally put the letter “S” for science into Unesco.
The editor and co-author of Science and Civilisation in China, a massive, multi-volume study, he spent more than half a century collecting and compiling evidence that China was the birthplace of everything from chess to cartography, from the stirrup to the suspension bridge. In the process, he probably did more than any other individual to shift the balance of scientific history towards the East.
Needham fell in love with China by first falling in love with a Chinese woman, a research assistant named Lu Gwei-djen (魯桂珍) who came to Cambridge in 1936. Though he was married, the relationship was apparently “open” and for the next 52 years Lu would be his mistress. The couple eventually married in 1989. With the help of Lu, the biochemist taught himself Chinese (Nanjing Mandarin) and in 1943 was flown into war-torn China by the British government on a diplomatic mission to help embattled Chinese scientists and academics. It was a dangerous assignment and one filled with will-sapping logistical difficulties, yet Needham maintained an unflappable optimism that was nothing less than heroic.
The finest sections of Winchester’s book describe the excursions Needham made to the further reaches of China, ostensibly goodwill trips, but really as a way of gathering data for the book that would become Science and Civilisation in China. Here we see Needham at his most intrepid and eccentric, a sort of Waugh character by way of Indiana Jones. China in the war years bore little resemblance to the economic powerhouse of today. Its industry was all but destroyed, roads were ancient (or non-existent) and poverty was widespread. How the once mighty Chinese empire had come to fall so low is, in essence, the basis of what became known as the “Needham question.”
Needham wanted to know why Chinese scientific innovation had ground to a halt in the 16th century, just when European science was taking off. As Winchester says, the Cambridge don “never fully worked out the answers.” Nevertheless, he was convinced that the solution to China’s problems was communism. He befriended Zhou Enlai (周恩來), number two to Mao Zedong (毛澤東), and managed, like many other intellectuals, to excuse or ignore the brutality and totalitarianism of communist rule.
In this field, he had form. He visited Moscow in 1935 and returned “powerfully reinforced” by the experience. This willingness to believe the best of the worst would almost destroy his professional standing. In 1952, Needham joined an international commission set up by the Chinese government to investigate reports that the Americans had used biological weapons in the Korean War. Led by the nose by Chinese agents, who mocked up sites and faked results, Needham declared the US guilty as charged.
In this conclusion, he was almost certainly wrong. As Winchester writes: “Needham was intellectually in love with communism and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him.” For a while, it looked as if he might lose his position at Cambridge. But the controversy passed and he went on to be elected master of Gonville and Caius College.
Needham was sympathetic to the student rebellions of 1968. During one sit-in, he sent a note to protesters: “I wish you to know that I support entirely all the reforms for which you are demonstrating today.” And in spite of his long-standing defense of Chinese academics, he was also an advocate of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which terrorized academia.
All the same, by the time of his death in 1995, Needham’s ideological beliefs were comprehensively overshadowed by his intellectual achievements. Chief of these are the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge and the enormous, perspective-altering endeavor that is Science and Civilisation in China. Such testaments speak for themselves, but what’s left to say is said with great verve and style by Winchester in this biography.
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