The Man Who Loved China (5 page)

His colleagues on the National Council for Civil Liberties represent a roll call of the intellectual left of the day: E. M. Forster, Clement Attlee, Nye Bevan, Havelock Ellis, Dingle Foot, Victor Gollancz, A. P. Herbert, Julian Huxley, George Lansbury, Harold Laski, David Low, Kingsley Martin, A. A. Milne, J. B. Priestley, Hannen Swaffer (a former neighbor in south London), R. H. Tawney, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, and Amabel Williams-Ellis.
⁵
All of them became firm friends. He addressed the University Socialist Society, finding himself lecturing to a comrade named Kim Philby, Trinity College representative, who would later become notorious as one of Britain's most celebrated spies. Needham joined forces with the extraordinary social anthropologist Tom Harrisson, a founder of Mass Observation.
⁶
He was enormously influenced by the communist crystallographer J. D. Bernal, and joined Sir Solly Zuckerman's famous scientific dining club, the Tots and Quots. He was, in other words and in all ways, a figure of the left-wing establishment, his credentials never in doubt, his subscriptions and his fealties always paid in full.

All this frantic activity led to some predictable muttering in the college. A number of the older fellows of Caius said that Needham's socialist leanings suggested a growing eccentricity, and the possibility that he was becoming unsound.
Eccentricity
was generally a backhanded compliment; but
unsound
was as pejorative as any word in the establishment's lexicon. Needham was notably thin-skinned in his youth, highly sensitive to criticism of any kind: “I shall have nothing further to do with your journal,” he wrote to the editor of the
Cambridge Review
, after the publication ran an essay lambasting him for his idealism and his left-wing views, “until your influence
is decisively removed from it.” But later, when he was more seasoned, Needham took attacks in his stride. He would quote an old Arab aphorism: “The dogs may bark—but the caravan moves on.”

Not surprisingly Needham was an instantly recruited and enthusiastic supporter of the Republican cause in the Spanish civil war, to which every left-winger in Europe became magnetically affixed from the moment it began in the summer of 1936. He never went off to fight, arguing that he had a full-time teaching job. But he campaigned, spoke out, attended rallies, organized. He lobbied hard, for instance, for the welfare of a group of Basque refugee children who were marooned in the village of Pampisford, just south of Cambridge. He helped design and test for the Republicans a plywood-and-deal field ambulance, powered by an American Harley-Davidson motorcycle engine—but it ran amok and smashed down a garden fence, for which Needham paid personally, and promptly, saying it would do the cause much harm if the bill went unsettled. And, most crucially, he also became a significant contributor to the Cornford-McLaurin fund, set up by the British Communist Party to help the families of two Cambridge members of the International Brigade—John Cornford, a twenty-one-year-old poet; and the New Zealander Campbell McLaurin, a mathematician—both of whom had been killed in the fight for Madrid in 1936.

 

The year was a grisly one, in Spain and elsewhere. Although in America the Great Depression was starting to lift and a cautiously optimistic country would reelect Franklin Roosevelt to a second term in the White House, it was the wretchedness of Europe that preoccupied the world: the Spanish war, the Berlin Olympics (which Needham wanted Britain to boycott), the Nazis' occupation of the Rhineland, the world's growing awareness of Adolf Hitler, and even the sad farce of King Edward's abdication most properly defined the year. And for the world the following twelve months would scarcely be better—Europe would suffer the first real fear that it was soon to be plunged into one almighty war; and with an outbreak of shooting on a bridge outside Beijing in 1937, China and Japan were promptly plunged into another.

Yet for Joseph Needham 1937 happened to be a very good year, and one which marked a turning point for him. The crucial moment came late one sunny summer day when he was contentedly sequestered in his laboratory. There came a soft knock at his door. He had a visitor.

 

In June, in the hot, teeming city of Shanghai 8,000 miles to the east of Cambridge, a young and highly capable woman was preparing to board an ocean liner, bound for England, and for a new life immersed in a brand new science.

Lu Gwei-djen, the daughter of an esteemed apothecary in Nanjing and now a budding biochemistry researcher, was clever, glamorous, and thirty-three years old when she joined the Blue Star liner headed for its long sea voyage to the port of Tilbury, outside London. She was traveling to England, and specifically to Cambridge, for one reason only: to meet and work with the biochemical couple she admired above all others—Joseph and Dorothy Needham.

From what she had read in the technical journals—not least the reviews of his stunning three-volume study of embryology—she knew well to admire Joseph Needham's scientific work. She also knew that Dorothy Needham was in her own right an expert in the same field of muscle biochemistry as Gwei-djen. So for purely scientific reasons, Cambridge was the obvious place for her to go.

But there was more to it than the quality of the science. Politics and political sympathy also played a part in her decision. From what she had read in those imported British newspapers and political weeklies that made their way to Shanghai, Lu Gwei-djen also knew that Joseph Needham was a prominent and eager member of the political left and so was very much in step with her own political ideals. Moreover, the vast range of his interests suggested that he was something of a Renaissance man, and she knew that the press had suggested he might be regarded as a latter-day Erasmus.

She had read of his interest in the Spanish civil war, an event that had especially captured the imagination of many of the young and more radical Chinese. She herself had wanted to contribute her mite to the Cornford-McLaurin Fund. The thought that these two promising young men had braved so much, and then had lost their lives to a cause that was so clearly good, was to her intensely romantic; and those who supported the fund—as she knew Joseph Needham had—must, she felt, be thoroughly admirable.

Lu Gwei-djen, the brilliant young biochemist from Nanjing, in a formal portrait taken in 1937 shortly before she left China for Cambridge, and a life as Needham's mistress and muse.

Her plan was to pursue a field of biochemical research that was then virtually unknown in China, so impoverished and troubled were the country's universities. Though a number of other universities around the world, particularly those in America, offered her places and opportunities, she wanted most of all to come to England. Her keenest ambition was to work at Sir Frederick Hopkins's now world-renowned Biochemistry Institute,
and perhaps while there to make contact with these two scientists who had become her faraway heroes.

The merit of her own work was all too evident, and on seeing her résumé Hopkins accepted her application in a flash. Dorothy Needham, to whom the professor had then passed her letter, agreed readily to help her as an adviser, and perhaps even to become her academic supervisor.

Lu Gwei-djen had been born on July 22, 1904, into a highly regarded Christian family. The first character of her given name,
, was chosen to signify the sweet-smelling osmanthus tree that blooms in eastern China in July, the month of her birth; and the second,
, signifies treasure, a thing of great value. As an infant she was plump, active, and widely adored—but her life got off to a shaky start, thanks to the civil wars raging across eastern China, and her family was forced to evacuate to Shanghai to get away from the battles being fought around Nanjing. She did not begin her formal education until she was nine, when the situation calmed down enough for her to come home.

She had started out as a rebellious and archly nationalistic child—as a teenager she had insisted to her friends that she would never learn English, and that those Chinese who did so were no better than “traitors and fools.” But then in 1922 she won a coveted place at a newly built American-run college that would soon be famous—Nanjing's Ginling College for Girls, the “little sister in the Orient” of Smith College in Massachusetts.

Under the soothing ministrations of this liberal American education, Lu Gwei-djen began to mellow. Within no more than a few months her early anger had all dissipated. She swiftly became fascinated by English, and within a year was fluent in it. She took up the piano with gusto. She studied—“with an intense desire,” she recounted later—though her early choices of mathematics, religion, English, and hygiene slowly gave way to an all-science curriculum. She began this with the study of zoology and botany, before finally developing a keen interest in biochemistry and in particular the study of the mechanics of animal muscles.

She boarded a steamer at Shanghai in the early summer of 1937. Two other young scientists accompanied her—Shen Shizhang, who after studying with Needham went on to become a professor of zoology at Yale; and Wang Yinglai, who won fame by being the first to create synthetic insulin.
The crossing from the Yangzi to the Thames took two months; their ship docked in London in late August.

After a first night in a cheap hotel in London the three took the train to Cambridge and found their digs, a small flat conveniently close to the railway station. From here it was just a short walk to Tennis Court Road and the renowned Biochemistry Institute. Sir Frederick Hopkins, his seventy-six years now very much showing in his evident frailty and his snow-white mustache, was on hand to greet them; and Dorothy Needham took them to their rooms.

Lu Gwei-djen remembered very well her first meeting, later that same day, with Joseph Needham. She recalled walking down the hall to his room, then knocking gently on the wooden door. She was excited, after months of anticipation. She imagined, she later wrote, that she would now meet “an old man with a bushy white beard.”

She could not have been more wrong: instead of the hare-eyed boffin she expected, there stood before her “a young dark-haired biochemist, breathless from running from place to place and clad in a plain white overall with many holes caused by the acid of bench experiments.” He was handsome, in a studious way. He was very tall, muscular, rangy. He wore tortoiseshell-framed glasses, and a shock of hair kept falling over his forehead, which he brushed back with his hand from time to time. His voice was strong, but it had a silkiness, almost a lisp, that she found instantly captivating.

“I had absolutely no idea,” she wrote later, “that the presence of my colleagues and myself would have earthshaking effects on Joseph Needham, for whom I supposed we would be no more interesting than any other research students working for their doctorates, and no more. But between us and Joseph Needham a strange magnetic force developed.

“As he afterwards wrote, the more he got to know us, the more exactly like himself in scientific grasp and intellectual penetration he found us to be; and this led his inquisitive mind to wonder why therefore had modern science originated only in the western world? Much later on, after he and I had started investigating Chinese history, a second question presented itself—namely why, during the previous fourteen centuries, had China been so much more successful than Europe in acquiring knowledge of
natural phenomena, and using it for human benefit? Such were the mainsprings of the
Science and Civilisation in China
project.”