The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Joseph Needham (1900–1995) is the man who made China China, forming the West's understanding of a sophisticated culture with his masterpiece, Science and Civilization in China, says bestselling author Winchester. In a life devoted to recording the Middle Kingdom's intellectual wealth, Needham, an eccentric, brilliant Cambridge don, made a remarkable journey from son of a London doctor through scientist-adventurer to red scare target. In Winchester's (The Professor and the Madman) estimable hands, Needham's story comes to life straightaway. From the biochemist's arrival in WWII Chongqing (the smells, of incense smoke, car exhaust, hot cooking oil, a particularly acrid kind of pepper, human waste, oleander, and jasmine) to his steely discipline when crafting his research into prose (to an old friend: I am frightfully busy. You come without an appointment, so I am afraid I cannot see you), Winchester plunges the reader into the action with hardly a break. As the author notes in an outstanding epilogue—a swirling 12-page trip through the kaleidoscope of contemporary China—he is at pains to place Needham front and center in our understanding of the nation that now plays such a huge role in American life. B&w photos, maps. (May)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Judith Shapiro

The great Sinologist Joseph Needham (1900-1995) is a legend for his Science and Civilization in China, an encyclopedic account of China's achievements in science and technology. But it is the famous "Needham question," which asks why the country failed to industrialize when Europe did, despite its prior achievements in printing, explosives, navigation, hydraulics, ceramics and statecraft, that may revive his legacy and compel re-reading of his 24-volume masterwork. As China transforms into an industrial powerhouse, we may ask the inverse question: Why is China now booming after centuries of relative stagnation, and on what traditions will it draw?

In The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman, builds on his success in writing about eccentric British intellectuals. Needham makes a great subject. A Cambridge University polymath who made his youthful mark as a biochemist, he was also a nudist, a performer of English folk dances involving ankle bells and sticks, an accordion player and an active Communist. His happy marriage to chemist Dorothy Needham survived his lifelong passion for his mistress, Lu Gwei-djen, the biochemist who taught him Chinese and collaborated with him on his master project. Their "peculiarly organized love life" was so cordial that the three lived on the same Cambridge street and often took tea together. Above all, Needham was an indefatigable researcher, whether he was stranded by a broken truck in northwest China's desert or working long hours in his Cambridge study so crammed with materials that assistants were sometimes chosen for their small size.

Needham's career shifted dramatically in 1943, when his government tapped him to establish a Sino-British cultural and scientific exchange behind the front lines of Japanese-occupied China. From Chongqing, a base in the interior to which the Nationalist government had fled, Needham provided struggling Chinese scientists with laboratory equipment and textbooks while pursuing his research on Chinese inventions.

Needham's notable side trips included one to the Dunhuang caves in Western China, where the woodblock Diamond Sutra (868 A.D.), the world's first printed book, had been discovered. Along the way, he stopped at Dujiangyan, the great diversion dam project, built around 250 B.C., which was recently in the news because it lies near the epicenter of the horrific Sichuan earthquake. (Miraculously, it seems to have survived.) Needham's journey to southeastern Fujian province was cut short when the Japanese moved in, bombing bridges as he fled back to Chongqing. His intellectual curiosity and energy turned every hair's-breadth wartime escape into an opportunity to gather the materials that would inform his life's work. He kept impeccable notes and shipped out antique manuscripts by the crate.

On his return to Cambridge in 1948 after two years at UNESCO, Needham began cataloguing and writing up his findings. When Science and Civilization in China started to appear in 1954, it was intended to fill two volumes. But the project expanded -- first to the consternation, later to the pride of Cambridge University Press -- to reach 18 volumes by his death in 1995. It continues to grow today as his collaborators complete work on topics such as ceramics and metallurgy.

The volumes, some of which were co-authored with Lu Gwei-djen and other Chinese researchers, cover mechanical engineering, paper and printing, alchemy, chemistry and military technology. The classic Civil Engineering and Nautics details inventions designed to harness nature; the Chinese were masters at building bridges, walls, canals and boats, and also designed "anchors, moorings, dock and lights, towing and tracking, caulking, hull-sheathing and pumps, diving and pearling, the ram, armor plating, grappling irons, and the tactics of firing naval projectiles." Other Chinese innovations of interest to Needham ranged from wheelbarrows to fishing reels, "the umbrella, the spinning wheel, the kite . . . playing cards, tuned drums, fine porcelain, perfumed toilet paper, the game of chess."

During the McCarthy years, the staunchly pro-communist Needham was barred from the United States and shunned in England, in part because he supported charges that U.S. forces had dropped plague-infested rodents on northeast China during the Korean War. As head of an investigative commission of international scientists, he interviewed Chinese people who reported outbreaks of vermin and disease, which convinced him of a biological warfare campaign. Winchester reports that Needham was hoodwinked. If, however, Needham was correct, that puts a different slant on his disgrace, which in any event was temporary. As the political climate shifted and his books collected accolades, he was made master of Caius College at Cambridge, where he enjoyed decades of honors and respect. Two years after his wife's death at 92 from Alzheimer's, he married Lu Gwei-djen in a union of elderly soul mates; she passed away shortly thereafter.

Despite Winchester's extraordinary narrative skills, he gets some details wrong. The assertion that China became "more stable" after the Japanese defeat in 1945 is a surprising clunker given his masterful depiction of war-torn China. (A footnote mentions the civil war between Nationalists and Communists.) More troubling is the depiction of the Yangtze River as the only unchanged feature of modern Chongqing. As the author of an excellent book on the Yangtze, Winchester should have known better than to ignore the devastating changes wrought by the Three Gorges Dam, which has profoundly altered the flow of that great river.

The importance of Needham's work lies not only in the mega-projects for which China is most famous but also in the small-scale technologies that he lovingly detailed. If China follows the model of the industrialized West (and if we ourselves persist on our current path), the exploitation of fossil fuels, minerals, forests and other resources may push the Earth past the tipping point. In retelling Needham's story, Winchester focuses on the inventiveness of the Chinese people, whose creativity once surpassed that of all other civilizations. If this resourcefulness can be renewed and harnessed in the service of sustainability, then perhaps there is hope not only for China but for the planet.


Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
With The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester turns out another compelling, readable, and relevant tale. Any good storyteller will embellish his subject, and Winchester effortlessly keeps readers interested in Needham’s adventuresâ€"even when they flag a bit. For the most part, though, Needham’s life is one that relatively few readers will knowâ€"and one that Winchester brings to life with a passel of research and an ever-present sense of wonder for his unique subject. Despite some errors and repetition, the book is also a good starting point for any reader who seeks another path to understanding the roots of Chinese civilization.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Product Description

In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country.

No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair.

He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind's most familiar innovations—including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper—often centuries before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys, vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war-torn China to far-flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese people.

After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in China, describing the country's long and astonishing history of invention and technology. By the time he died, he had produced, essentially single-handedly, seventeen immense volumes, marking him as the greatest one-man encyclopedist ever.

Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping story of China through Needham's remarkable life. Here is an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great—related by one of the world's inimitable storytellers.


About the Author

Simon Winchester's many books include 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.