She was named Lu Gwei-djen, and she was Chinese, born thirty-nine years before in the city of Nanjing, and a scientist like himself. They had met in Cambridge six years earlier, when she was thirty-three and he was thirty-seven and a married man. They had fallen in love, and Dorothy Needham, to whom Joseph had at the time been married for more than ten years, decided to accept the affair in a spirit of intellectually tolerant and fashionably left-wing complaisance.
In falling headlong for Gwei-djen, Joseph Needham found that he also became enraptured by her country. She had taught him her language, and he now spoke, wrote, and read it with a fair degree of fluency. She had suggested long before that he travel to China and see for himself what a truly astonishing country it was – so different, she kept insisting, from the barbaric and enigmatic empire most westerners believed it to be.
And he had taken her words to heart, so that now, on this hot spring evening in 1943, he was at the start of a diplomatic mission to China – a mission that, unknown to him, to Gwei-djen,, and to all his many friends and colleagues at the time, would lead him in the most extraordinary and unexpected directions.
In years to come Joseph Needham would emerge from these travels as unarguably the foremost student of China in the entire western world, a man who undertook a series of difficult and dangerous adventures and who discovered, recorded, and then later made sense of the deepest secrets of the Middle Kingdom, many of which had been buried for centuries.
At the time of his arrival the western world still knew very little about the place. To be sure, matters had evolved somewhat since Marco Polo’s expedition in the thirteenth century, since the seventeenth-century travels of the Jesuit fathers, and even since the nineteenth century, when Americans, Britons, and an assortment of other Europeans first fanned out across China as warriors, explorers, missionaries, or traders: they all sent or brought back lurid tales of China as a land of pagodas, rice terraces, elaborate palaces, emperors enfolded in yellow silk, swirling calligraphy, disciplined order, keening music, ivory chopsticks, incense, bamboo-battened junks, the ceremonies of the kowtow and the “death of a thousand cuts,” and the finest porcelain ever made. It was a place like no other on earth: vast, complex, and quietly superior; a cocoon of an empire that seemed to command among its neighbours – Japan, Korea, the various monarchies of Indochina – respect, fear, and amazement in equal measure.
By the time Needham arrived, this view had changed, reflecting the melancholy new reality of China itself. In 1911, with the suddenness of the gallows, the ancient Chinese empire had fallen and its celestial court had been consigned to ignominy. The country that was then beginning its long struggle to emerge from thousands of years of imperial rule was in a terrible state. It was shattered by the bitter rivalries of a dozen regional fiefdoms; it was seething with the conflicting ambitions of newly imported ideologies; greedy foreign powers were gnawing away at its major cities and at its outer edges. The culminating humiliation was the Japanese invasion, begun formally in 1937, which by the time Needham arrived had resulted in the military occupation of one-third of the country.
“This booby nation,” the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson had complained in 1824. He was well ahead of his time. Most of his generation saw China as an exotic Oriental enigma, pushed well beyond the main-stream of global culture, an irrelevant place that could offer to the outside world little more than silk, porcelain, tea, and rhubarb, and all wrapped in a coverlet of unfathomable mystery.
Some few took a longer view. John Hay, America’s secretary of state at the turn of the twentieth century, remarked in 1899 that China was now the “storm centre of the world,” and that whoever took the time and trouble to understand “this mighty empire” would have “a key to politics for the next five centuries.” But his was a view drowned out by the onrush of events – not the least of them being the dramatic collapse of the empire itself. By the 1920s, when Chinese warlords were battling furiously with one another, when millions were dying in an endless succession fo civil wars and millions were suffering from poverty of a kind that was hard to imagine elsewhere, the country was widely regarded by most outsiders with a mixture of disdain, contempt, and utter exasperation; and the more simplistic views, like Emerson’s, were now widely held.
But Joseph Needham would alter this perception of China, almost overnight and almost single-handedly. Through his many adventures across the country this quite remarkable man would manage to shine the brightest of lights on a vast panorama of Chinese enigmas – and in doing so he would discover, like no other outsider before or since, that the Chinese, far from existing beyond the mainstream of human civilization, had in fact created much of it.