He also wondered briefly – while being interrogated by a Chinese chemist he met – about a supposedly distinguished British scientist whom the Chinese gentleman was certain was named Queenie Woggin. After some head-scratching Needham realized he was being asked about Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, an expert on fungi who went on to be head of the women’s branch of the British Army. She most certainly had a queenly manner, which he supposed might have accounted for the error. Walking swiftly away from his interrogator, he fell into a hole in the road, up to his neck, a feat that he later said greatly amused everyone, particularly the women. He took himself off to a neighbour’s veranda to restore his bruised dignity, lit his evening cigar, and spent an hour gazing in rapture over the blue hills of Fujian, the masses of rhododendrons trembling in the cooling breeze, the scent of gardenia in the air.
He wrote down, quite simply, that China, at moments like this, was surely the loveliest place on earth.
Finally, after they had spent a month on the road, their destination was in sight. Wearying of driving over mountain ranges, they decided to travel to Fuzhou – an island of westernized civility set down in a sea of Japanese malevolence – on a steam-powered riverboat. The Min courses placidly down to the sea from its source in the Jura-like mountains to the west, and Fuzhou sits four-square at its mouth – so a boat was a far more reliable means of getting to the town, and Needham loved boats almost as much as he loved trains.
While he was waiting for the steamboat in the riverside town of Nanping he happened – again, typically – on an American whom he thought of principally as an ornithologist, John Caldwell. Needham, an amateur bird-watcher, had long owned a copy of Caldwell’s definitive work The Birds of South China. More officially, however, John Caldwell, China-born and a native speaker of Chinese, was something else altogether.
Ostensibly he was employed as a journalist for the US Office of War Information. But in fact, like many of the racy, mysterious foreigners who then operated in this part of China, he was a spy. And he was quite a talkative, matter-of-fact spy. He seemed to know what was going on locally, and felt that all of a sudden the situation seemed ominous. There were, he warned Needham, faint – but to him unmistakable – indications of a gathering storm. He told Needham that he was ‘getting jumpy’ and was preparing to evacuate his father and mother, who lived nearby. It was a subtly coded message that Needham well understood: from now on, be very, very careful; the Japanese were planning something.
Yet whatever it was, Needham still had a mission to accomplish for the crown. The boat to Fuzhou left in the dark on the appointed day, Needham sitting happily in the bow as it lurched down the infamous rapids of the Min. The voyage took a little over twelve hours, and the first man he met when the boat tied up at the Fuzhou docks that afternoon turned out to be a spy also. This time, though, his new acquaintance was a British spy: Murray MacLehose, who at the time of their meeting was on a top-secret mission. Eventually, MacLehose would manage to escape from the murky business of espionage and embark on a glorious and very public diplomatic career.
Murray, later Lord, MacLehose was a giant of a Scotsman who spent almost all of his life – aside from a brief spell in the late 1960s when he was unaccountably made British ambassador to Denmark – working in the East, and who ended his career as probably the most fondly remembered of all the colonial governors of Hong Kong. At the start of his working life, when he joined the Malayan civil service, he was sent to the Chinese treaty port of Xiamen, then known as Amoy, a couple of hundred miles down the coast from Fuzhou, where he was now posted, and where he could learn the local coastal dialect of Hokkienese. But in December 1941 the Japanese captured Amoy and hauled off whatever British diplomats they could find, including MacLehose. At first they interned the British; then, accepting the terms of the Geneva Convention, they called in the Red Cross as an intermediary and sent them all home to Britain.
MacLehose might have remained at home, except that the wily old men of the British intelligence services had other plans. They decided to send this ambitious, impressive-looking, linguistically competent young Scot right back to China – to the port of Fuzhou, which was still free. He would work there under cover of being the British vice-consul and would train Chinese guerrillas to operate behind Japanese lines and carry out sabotage. This was what he was doing, officially but covertly, when he and Needham first met, beside the old Fuzhou River bridge in May 1944.
Because of the secret nature of this work, Needham chose to remove all material relating to MacLehose – who was arguably one of the most interesting and celebrated Britons Needham ever encountered in China – from all his subsequent published works on China. ‘The following morning we took the river-steamer down to Fuzhou,’ he writes in his book Science Outpost, ‘where we spent an enjoyable five days. The narrative resumes after our return.’ And that was that.
Even the few references to MacLehose and to the British consul, Keith Tribe, that appear in Needham’s private and unpublished diaries are fairly circumspect, and anodyne. He says that MacLehose took him to stay in the consulate in the old Foreign Concession – which reminded him of Clapham, where he grew up. He writes that it was a lovely old property full of objets d’art, and that H. T., being Chinese, was asked to stay in a hotel across the street. He says his bedroom was enormous, with a very large bathroom. They had tea – rolls, honey, jam – and he could close his eyes and imagine himself back home.
The men then evidently went on to have a grand old time. They had elaborate massages; took a junk out to the Pagoda Anchorage, where the China tea clippers used to take on cargo; spent time at the still elegant Fuzhou Club, whose bar was frequented by prosperous western swells; visited a number of the lacquer and ceramics factories for which the city is famous; and dined on fish with the equally well known Fuzhou sauce of fermented red rice and wine, the making of which – the mash contained Monascus yeasts – excited Needham greatly (he noted down the details for his book). They also visited two great antiquarian bookshops for which Fuzhou was well known.
Needham had to purchase two enormous rattan trunks in which to ship all the volumes (including fifty-six that were presented to him by members of the Fuzhou Club) back to Chongqing. Most were devoted to the history of Chinese science, and all are still housed in Cambridge today, in the great east Asian science library he accumulated over the years.
All told, the five days passed in a whirlwind of activity, much of it undertaken with Murray MacLehose – and yet Needham did not leave behind one remark, either in his published book or his private diaries, relating either to their conversations or to the vice-consul’s duties. Once in a while the man’s initials appear, as in ‘lunched with MM’ or ‘MM at dinner’ – but that was all. Others get much fuller treatment: a Mr Pearson is described as ‘pompous and talkative’, Keith Tribe as ‘interesting and nice’. But there is nothing of Murray MacLehose.
And then Needham and H. T. set out for home – this time, because of the reports from the consulate (and presumably from the two spies) that the Japanese were now bent on quickly closing the net.
It was a race. Almost every town they passed through had already been visited by Japanese bombers whose crews were softening up targets ahead of an infantry push. They often had to take long diversions to get around ruined buildings and broken roads. On 29 May, the Chinese state radio broadcast the news that a Japanese offensive had started – and within hours the highways began to choke with panicked refugees, and the air came alive with waves of aircraft, mostly American and Chinese, heading west and north to head off the enemy incursions.
Needham still insisted on visiting places of interest – a tungsten mine here, a gasworks there, an epidemiology laboratory in this town, an experimental farm there – but H. T. was pressing him ever onwards. H. T. understood Hokkienese, as Needham did not, and was fully aware of the growing danger. The crucial point on the journey came with their attempted crossing of the great Xiang River bridge at the city of Hengyang –
a crossing they had accomplished without a moment’s thought three weeks before.
Now the Japanese were licking at their heels, and for the first time Joseph Needham’s legendary calm showed signs of crumbling. If they didn’t cross this bridge ahead of the Japanese, they would be trapped, imprisoned, interned – or very much worse. Usually he was indifferent to the vicissitudes of war, preferring to read his Chinese–English Dictionary as the attacks went on. But now, on 2 June, he called a council of war with H. T. He had wanted to visit a number of factories in the provincial government centre of Taiho, but he was worried. He wrote in his journal: ‘Even if Changsha holds out, there may be severe dislocation of traffic at Hengyang, preventing us getting to the west with our truck and the valuable records so far. So decided – not to go.’ They now had to make for the bridge, or bust.
They heard alarming reports – that Hengyang had been bombed continuously for three days; that the Americans had bombed and destroyed twenty-two Japanese steam locomotives at Hankou; and, most ominously, that Japanese troops were racing north from Guangzhou to meet those streaming south from north of the Yangzi, and the two armies would soon meet in a giant all-crushing pincer movement. Needham started taking all this very seriously, at times even listening to the radio – ‘I can hear the American plane pilots and the ground staff talking!’ he exclaimed excitedly.
They decided to race for the bridge. They stopped briefly at a second tungsten mine and watched men washing the wolframite from the crushed quartz – H. T. grinding his teeth in frustration – but then pressed on, the urgency growing by the hour, the situation becoming ever more perilous.
Saturday 3rd June. After lunch passed an unusual number of trucks… mostly full of gasoline for the American airfields… some evacuating office or factory personnel. Passed several miles through an inferno of activity – thousands of men and women carrying loads of stone, no doubt for a new airfield. Not a day to be lost now.
Sunday 4th… progress interminably slow… air raid alarm, so we pulled out of the station and waited in a thick drizzle. Regrettably the decapitated corpse of a coolie between the railway tracks… after such an accident the railway people leave the results lying around for hours with a crowd of people looking on and saying ‘ai-ya’ – perhaps pour encourager les autres. Afterwards, as dusk fell and moonlight came on, smoked a cigar with H. T.… beautiful mountainous countryside in the night all around.
The steam engine strained slowly up the final range of hills before beginning its slow coast down into the Xiang River valley. From time to time it would stop unexpectedly, sometimes because of air raids, sometimes to allow passengers in their long gowns to clamber unsteadily down to the tracks and scuttle off into villages hidden in the woods. Each time they stopped, though, many more would-be passengers were clamouring to be let on the train, to escape the steady progress of the Japanese infantry. Needham and H. T. made way for newcomers until their compartment was crammed with sweating, frightened humanity; with baggage; and with a variety of farm animals. From time to time Needham tried to lead the refugees in song to keep their spirits up – but they were too nervous, and most of them kept staring anxiously out of the dirt-encrusted windows. Above all else they loathed the Japanese, and were gripped by fear at just what the troops might do.
Tuesday 6th. Hengyang at last. Saw station master who says he will put us across the river by the great railway bridge in 3 hours or so… situation very calm and normal except for soldiers making machine-gun posts and putting the station in a posture of defence. The railway is putting on three expresses daily in the Guilin direction, which is clearing the evacuees pretty well.
Throughout the day great air activity, squadron after squadron of P40s, and other fighters with the Chinese star on them, coming up from the airfield just east of the station and heading north – other squadrons returning – a marvellous sight – the planes often flying very low, with the tiger-faces prominent. Two trainloads of evacuees from Changsha, several trainloads of rails, signals and miscellaneous railway equipment, going across the river, to comparative safety from the Japs.
On the platforms some very good Chinese soldiers, tough-looking, with swords, fans and umbrellas, as well as rifles, listening to a talk by a captain with a revolver and a walking stick.
Examined two large (4-8-4 and 2-8-2) engines, English and German respectively, too badly damaged to be repaired; and then finally, about 5, when all hope seemed to be gone of crossing this day, engines came and remarshalled us and set up a train to go across.
Not off till 7 though, and then stood on the bridge approach for a long time – a lovely target. Sat on our own flatcar in the brilliant moonlight and smoked cigars. Bathed in a pool, then fell asleep.
It must have been the deepest of sleeps – because Needham’s next notation reports the outcome:
Woke at 11.30 to find we were already across, and in the West Station. So we got some tea.
They had escaped just in time. Two days later the Hengyang bridge was blown up, and the east bank of the Xiangjiang was irretrievably lost. Within a matter of days, just as had been feared, the entire Chinese salient in eastern China was forcibly folded into the Japanese empire. Chongqing, the country’s capital, would now be totally cut off from the east for the remainder of the war.
Needham decided to take the long way home. He spent time with his old friend Alwyn Ogden (H. G. Wells’s look-alike), the consul in Kunming, which was still untouched and just as peaceful as before. He reconnected with a woman friend there, who had a week’s holiday owing. The couple went deep into the Yunnan countryside, walking in bamboo forests, gathering wild strawberries, and bathing nude in the natural hot springs – all in the name of recovering from having been so close to a Japanese Army that so unexpectedly had gone on the offensive.
And then, on 1 July, with the Ogdens’ help, he managed to find a seat on a flight to the capital. He ended his account of his great Southeastern Journey simply, and laconically: ‘There was no one to meet me, but got a lift in Brigadier Wilson-Brand’s car. Found Dophi at dinner.’
∗
Needham would make many further journeys around the country, though none so ambitious as these. The most dangerous was the one he undertook in 1944, when he tried to get to the Burmese frontier. Fighting was continuing there, between the Japanese on one side and the British and Americans on the other. The Japanese were now in deep trouble,31 and were fighting with the tenacity of the cornered and the desperate. Yet it was not war but the region’s geological instability, and the resulting landslides, that presented Needham’s expedition with its greatest nuisance. It did not help matters that his truck crashed and overturned while he was zooming down one side of the Mekong River valley. The party lost much of its equipment, but no one was hurt.
During this tropical adventure he visited botanists, plant physiologists, and nutritionists – finding out, among other things, that they had just discovered the world’s richest source of vitamin C, the plant Emblica officinalis, which was known locally as the Chinese olive, ‘but which in fact belongs to the Euphorbiaceae’.32 Others were working on ways to improve the resin production of the lac insects, from which shellac is made. Someone was producing a ‘Guide to the Caterpillars of Yunnan’, ‘with special reference to the pests’; and someone else was about to finish a comprehensive guide to Yunnan’s flora.
And that was in only one building. In another he came across scientists who were looking at the electric responses of plants, at the underground fruiting of the peanut, at the metabolism of silkworms, at creating a taxonomy of mushrooms, at how wheat blight is spread, and at making a vast catalogue of the pharmaceutically useful plants found in China – this last project being conducted in an old village temple with a gigantic image of Guanyin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, gazing down with impassive approval.
Many of the scientists were French speakers, a fact that reflected France’s colonial influence in this corner of China, and the closeness of the Cochin-C
hinese territories of l’Indochine. The European tradition was strong: all the courses in the medical school were being taught in French, and one of the researchers in the biology department had been raised in Germany, and talked to Needham in her adopted tongue about her studies into the anatomy of frogs’ noses.
Outside the city, in a town called Lufeng, Needham spent time with the geologists who had just astonished the world by finding a nearly complete fossil of the small plant-eating dinosaur that is now called Lufengosaurus. He also bought a number of pairs of scissors, since before Lufeng became associated with the beasts of the Jurassic, it was famous for its cutlery, and its sharp edges were treasured throughout the old empire.
In a Confucian temple nearby he then found dozens of statisticians working under a stern image of the sage inscribed on a golden tablet. Needham, delighted beyond words with his visit, remarked in his diary that Confucius would have been pleased to see his temple so used, in the service of a people of whom he had once, in Analects 13, so famously written, ‘Enrich them first, then educate them’; and in Analects 12, ‘What is needed in governing is sufficient food and sufficient weapons; as for the people, make them sincere.’
Yet Needham did find moments to stop, and wonder. The most important came just as he was leaving the city for his failed attempt (thanks to the later truck accident) to reach the frontier. In his diary he considers that, although Kunming showed how the learned Chinese have a fathomless capacity for enquiry, there remained one mystery: why, if the Chinese were so clever and so endlessly inquisitive, inventive, and creative, had they for so long been so poor and scientifically backward?
Why had the kind of enquiry into the natural world, which Needham’s research suggested they had been pursuing for a thousand years and more, evidently become moribund for so very long? The question bothered him, nagged at him, vexed him – and always stayed in his mind, no matter how impressive the efforts of places like Kunming might be today. It was an expansion of the note he had scribbled on the BBC letter two years before: ‘Sci. in general in China – Why not develop?’ Something had happened, perhaps hundreds of years ago, that somehow blighted the promise of those earlier times. Needham vowed that one day he would determine just what that something might be.