A Chinese character

BOOK Review

BOMB, BOOK AND COMPASS: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China

by Simon Winchester

Viking, 326pp, £20

ON A WINTER EVENING IN 1938, Joseph Needham, one of Cambridge University's most brilliant scientists – and one of its most avid womanisers – lay in bed with a Chinese microbiologist who was also a colleague of Needham's extremely tolerant wife. Enjoying a post-coital cigarette, he asked her how its name might be rendered in Chinese. His diary records that she obliged by guiding him through the ideogram for "fragrant smoke". Charmed, he instantly resolved to learn this fascinating language.

It was the first step in a project that would absorb Needham until his death in 1995, turning him into one of the foremost Western authorities on China, dedicated to reminding the world that the Middle Kingdom's decline into backwardness and turmoil had been preceded by centuries of extraordinary creativity – including crucial inventions like gunpowder, printing and the compass, all mistakenly thought to have originated elsewhere. The vehicle for these and countless other revelations was to be a work "addressed," as Needham put it, "to all educated people". The first volume of Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, has never gone out of print. Eighteen volumes were released during Needham's lifetime; there are now 24, with more still to come.

Despite its hyperbolic title, Simon Winchester's biography presents a low-key, often beguiling view of its subject, who was blacklisted by the Americans until the 1970s and denounced for naivety in Britain for backing a dubious report that claimed the US had used biological weapons in Manchuria and North Korea in 1952. Faced with this, he retreated into the scholarly realm, where his accomplishments did much to restore his good name.

As Winchester demonstrated in his best-selling earlier book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, he is fascinated by the quirks of genius. And Needham had plenty of quirks, both minor (breakfast toast must be burned black) and major (an ardent advocacy of nudism). "Handsome, in a studious way," Needham spoke with "a silkiness, almost a lisp" and left few women free from his attentions. For almost 50 years, he kept both his wife and his Chinese mistress content, not only with him but with each other, even as he continued to play the field.

Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it's not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham's first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar.

Early in 1943, Needham was sent to China by the Foreign Office, charged with organising aid for Chinese scholars and scientists in flight from the Japanese invasion, who were attempting to re-establish their universities in the inner provinces. His travels over the next few years took him from the jungles of the Burmese border to the Gobi Desert and the seacoast of Fujian, on 11 expeditions that covered roughly 30,000 miles. He lived a life of grand adventure in wartime China, and Winchester presents its dangers and pleasures with panache. Whether Needham is donkey-racing near ancient Buddhist caves or packed into a train full of refugees speeding across a soon-to-be-bombed railway bridge, the exhilaration of this part of his life is immediately engaging. And so are the colourful characters who come his way.



None though quite match up to a man whose intellect can be gauged by this anecdote his wife used to tell about the period just before the publication of his three-volume treatise on chemical embryology: "She recalled watching him lying awake in bed, mentally visualising the book's page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities. Once this activity became too humdrum for him, she said, he further occupied himself by translating the selfsame pages from English into French, also in his head, and then correcting any errors that he fancied he could also see in this new translated text."