The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (P.S.) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060884614
• ISBN-13: 978-0060884611
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #10,773 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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68 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 4th biography, May 14, 2008

By	Stephen Balbach (Ashton, MD United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (Hardcover)

Simon Winchester certainly has the creative power to immortalize anyone or thing he writes about, and so it is with the life of Joseph Needham (1900-1995), a Cambridge scholar polymath. Needham is probably obscure to most people, but among his Don peers he is a legendary as the writer of a massive encyclopedia on Chinese science and civilization designed to answer that great question: Why was China the mother lode of scientific and cultural innovation for so long, and why did it come to a stop by the 15th century - why didn't the Industrial revolution happen in China? At one point China was making 15 great innovations per century (paper, compass, stirrup, etc..), according to Needham, but then the country stagnated and for the last 500 years or so had a reputation for backwardness and poverty. Similar to Jared Diamond's "Yali Question" (why did Europe have "cargo" and Yali didn't?), Needham set out to find answers by cataloging the history of Chinese innovation. He created a massive multi-volume encyclopedia of such prodigious learning, value and length it has been compared with James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, or Sidney Lee and the Dictionary of National Biography.

I've now read all four of Winchesters biographies (The Professor and the Madman (1998), The Map That Changed the World (2001), The Meaning of Everything (2003)) and I would rank "China" as good as 'The Meaning', not as good as 'Professor' and better than "Map". However Winchester has done something different this time and I hope he builds on it in the future, he has made the subject relevant on a global level - the rise of China and discovery of its past history and importance. More than a well-told and fascinating story of an eccentric English professor rescued from the obscurity of the archives, 'The Man Who Loved China' in a way is about the bigger picture of the rise and future of the largest nation on Earth, one of the central events of the 21st century.

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important and valuable book by a master biographer, May 15, 2008

By	Ian C. Ruxton (Kitakyushu,Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (Hardcover)

This is a most timely biography, its publication coinciding with the 2008 Beijing Olympics and a disastrous major earthquake, which have together turned the eyes of the world's media onto the "Middle Kingdom", as the Chinese have confidently called their country for 5,000 years, believing throughout this time that it is indeed the centre of the world. It now seems that China's (and Needham's) time in the spotlight has come at last.

I remember Joseph Needham as the Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University when I matriculated there as a young man in 1975, though he retired from the Mastership one year later. The Needham Research Institute at Cambridge for the study of East Asian history, science and technology preserves his name, while in China he is known as Li Yue-se, the name given to him by the woman who later became his second wife at the outset of his Chinese language studies "[i]n order to commingle her pupil's identity with his linguistic passion, and thus more effectively bind him to the wheel" (p. 40).

The descriptions I heard as an undergraduate of Needham as a "Marxist Catholic" [sic.] and "a great Chinese scholar" barely do justice to the man. Though I never remember having a conversation with the Great Man and was quite in awe of him, I often saw his slightly stooping figure - crowned somewhat mysteriously by a beret - walking in the old courts of the College. (He also sent me a telegram which I remember verbatim and treasure to this day: "Elected Scholarship Caius College. Congratulations Needham Master.")

Needham was - as Winchester says - a sociable man and invited us freshmen (including Alastair Campbell, later spin-doctor to Tony Blair) to meet him once in the Master's Lodge. In his address in the Hall to our group of Caius freshmen - the last he would welcome into the College - he told us in a somewhat cavalier way not to seek singlemindedly for distinction, or aim for a first class degree, but to enjoy and make the most of our time at the University and be happy about any honours which happened to come our way. (I have attempted to follow his benevolent advice!)

Simon Winchester's skilful book is an overdue tribute to this great British academic-eccentric. It is a fair and impartial account, and does the subject ample justice. There are one or two very minor typographical errors. Nevertheless, I read the book rapidly and almost in one sitting, which is rare for me and a testament to its readability.

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, whatever his flaws and errors of judgment may have been, deserves greater fame outside Cambridge and China. This carefully crafted must-read page-turner of a work will surely supply it, and stimulate in many readers a desire to read some of Needham's own books. (After this I want to read more by Simon Winchester too - he certainly likes to write about big literary creations and their creators!)

Ian Ruxton, editor of The Diaries of Sir Ernest Satow, British Envoy in Peking (1900-06), Vol. 1 of two and The Semi-Official Letters of British Envoy Sir Ernest Satow from Japan and China (1895-1906). (I guess Needham's influence extended to my research also, to a considerable degree!)

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sinophilia orgy, July 23, 2008

By	H. Schneider "Hermit" (window seat) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (Hardcover)

I have decided to elevate Joseph Needham to the ranks of my primary heroes. That means he joins Vinegar Joe Stilwell (the American General who tried to teach Chiang Kai Shek how to run an army so that he might win a war; he failed, as you probably know) and Alfred Russell Wallace (the man who found that evolution works via natural selection, but had a marketing disadvantage to his colleague Charles Darwin; the theory is called Darwinism, not Wallacism, as you might know). Needham wrote close to 20000 pages on the history of Chinese science and civilization, he was a most amazing alround scientist. The 'book', or should we call it a library, is unsurpassed in his subject - but have you ever heard of it? I mean you, the non-expert on China. Let me know. I suspect very few people outside an inner circle ever heard of it.
Winchester has published quite a few books on diverse subjects. I mainly like his travel books: first a walk through South Korea, then a ship ride up the Yangzi. Given that he is an experienced travel writer, I am a bit puzzled by some of his geographical gaffes: flying over the hump from India to Kunming, the connection from British India to National China during WW2, W. claims the plane had to cross glaciers. Well, not likely. Better look it up on a map. Glacial melting can't have progressed that much since then. Or: Needham's first stop in China is Kunming, where he allegedly watches the sun set over the distant Tibetan hills on his first evening after arriving. Odd in view of the hundreds km distance from Kunming to Tibet and the fact that the city has its own hills to the West.
Apart from Needham's scientific formidability, he was also a prime specimen of British excentricity (they allow every excentricity in Cambridge, as long as it doesn't frighten the horses): a biochemist with highest distinctions early on, married to a brillant colleague, a freethinker, nudist, socialist, folk dancer, playboy, leftist activist, member of the left establishment, language genius, lay preacher (yes, he was also religious).
And then: he meets his lifetime love, a Chinese colleague from Nanjing (whom he will marry half a century later), who makes him learn the language. He manages to get an assignment with the Foreign Service during WW2 and moves to Chongqing in 43, as Counsellor to the Embassy.
That's the beginning of the end. The man starts researching and writing... 20 volumes? He is obsessed with Chinese history and goes on his decade long rampage.
As implied above, he was somewhat of a political fool, but it's hard for me to begrudge him that. Not everybody looked at it so generously though. For a while he had a key position in UNESCO, in charge of science (he put the S into UNECO), when Julian Huxley was the DG. The US pushed him out for his communist sympathies.
Worse was to come: he let himself be misused by China for Cold War propaganda in connection with the Korean War, as head of an 'independant' commission that was to investigate alleged US uses of biological weapons against Korea and China. From what is known today, no such thing happened, the whole show was staged by the Soviets and the Chinese, and Needham spoiled his name for years to come. He got blacklisted in the US for 20 years. He was just too naive and believed that everybody else was as honest and serious as he was himself.
One sad thing I learned from the book: the recent earthquake in Sichuan hit a place of magnificent historical importance, the great water works at Dujiangyan, built 250 BC, comprising dikes, dams, canals.