The Man Who Loves Scholars
I am a huge fan of Simon Winchester — a peripatetic Brit who writes brilliantly about geology, lexicography, and sinology. At his best, Winchester turns science into biography by demonstrating how an obscure scholar shaped our view of the world.
Winchester majored in geology at Oxford and worked in the field for many years before turning to writing. His 2001 book The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology is a fine treatise on a man whose world map revolutionized shipping, energy, religion, and science and inspired a young Charles Darwin as he sailed across the globe. Winchester followed with Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded in 2003 – the colorful story of the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded. In 2005 he published A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. All three books are cogent history, good science, frequently funny, and in the case of the volume on Smith, compelling biography.
Winchester’s pair of books on the Oxford English Dictionary traces the impact of the
remarkable James Murray, effectively the author of the massive OED. The story, published in the US as The Professor and the
Madman, tells the story of Murray and of one of his most prolific
contributors, an American civil war surgeon, Dr. WC Minor, who,
unbeknownst to Murray, was convicted of murder in England and
authored more than ten thousand entries to the OED from his
book-lined cell in the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminaly Insane. In
2003, Winchester followed this best-seller with The Meaning of
Everything – the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. The first is
a classic must-read best-seller; I haven’t read the second.
Winchester has now also produced two excellent books on China. In 1996
he attempted to trace the headwaters of the Yangtze and to use his
journey to highlight the hidden history of the Middle Kingdom. The
resulting travel guilde summary of Chinese history, The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the
Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time, was a great read, even if the premise of the book required a bit of upstream paddling If nothing else, the book confirmed Winchester’s gift for finding editors to send him on lovely trips. (National
Geographic commissioned him to visit each of the six major whirlpools
on earth. Nice work if you can get it!)
Just out and a wonderful summer read is The Man Who Loved China: The
Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries
of the Middle Kingdom — the life of Joseph Needham. Once again,
Winchester writes a definitive biography of an obscure and slightly odd
British scholar in order to tell a fascinating story.
Joseph Needham was a brilliant Cambridge biochemist. To this day he is
the only scientist ever awarded the Order of the Companions of Honour
by the Queen, and elected by his peers as Fellow of both the Royal
Society and the British Academy. He married Dorothy Mary Moyle Needham,
also an accomplished biochemist, and also a Fellow of the Royal
Society, (they are the only married couple ever elected to this elite
institution of top scientists).
But the world will not remember Joseph Needham for his biochemistry. We
will will remember instead his work in an entirely unrelated field for
which Needham was untrained and uncredentialed. Needham is the author
of one of the most comprehensive and remarkable works of scholarship
ever published — The History of Science and Technology in China. When he
died in 1998, his "book" had become a multi-scholar project that had produced of seventeen volumes all overseen by Needham. It is now twenty-four.
The work has reshaped not only the West’s understanding of China’s
scientific and technological past — but China’s
understanding of its own history as well.
The research is stunning. Needham realized that Chinese scientists and inventors did not just
develop the compass, gunpowder, paper, and printing before the west –
they invented or discovered just about everything else as well,
from vaccines and tree grafting, coinage and hydrology, to deodorant
and toilet paper. The depth and breadth of Chinese
science and technology is utterly extraordinary — as is the mystery as to why the rate of
innovation in the west suddenly surpassed China’s, known today as "the Needham
question". And the discovery would not
likely have been made by an ordinary scientist.
But Needham was neither an ordinary scientist nor an ordinary human. He was a
hopeless polyglot. He prided himself a committed nudist and Morris
dancer (interests that he graciously pursued separately). He was a non-doctrinaire but nonetheless blinkered socialist (Mao Zedong and Chou Enlai happily exploited
Needham’s prestige for their own propoganda on more than one
occassion).
Perhaps most important, he was a man who effectively took two wives –
the distinguished colleague noted earlier and a graduate student named
Lu Gwei-djen, who anchored the remarkably open manage a trois for more
than fifty years. It was Lu who introduced Needham to China, taught him
to read, write, and speak fluent Mandarin, and collaborated with him on
his life’s most important work. Needham married Lu when Dorothy died (he was, after all, a devout Catholic).
During the second World War, Needham was sent by the British Society
and Churchill to give aid and comfort to scientists in "Free China". This gave Needham extraordinary license to travel
throughout any part of China not occupied by Japan. He was based in
Chongqing (today the largest city in China, with a population as big as California) but traveled very widely and under extraordinarily
difficult circumstances. Wherever he went, Needham met with scientists, ordered essential supplies for them from the UK, gathered
on the history of Chinese science and technology, and
shipped crateloads of books and documents back to Cambridge.
After the war, Needham devoted his life to his magnum opus, helped
found UNESCO (he is credited by many with putting the "S" in the UN’s
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), and somewhat blindly
promoted the Chinese Communist government (on occasion willfully
overlooking evidence of its brutality and economic failure). But his work has been universally acclaimed and seems likely to be consulted as long as the
OED or Smith’s maps for helping us understand that a great deal of the
science and technology that we take for granted came from China, not
the west.
Winchester loves China and clearly identifies with Needham as strongly
as he did James Murray and William Smith. Once again, Winchester’s research is extensive and
carefully documented, his story highly compelling, and his writing first rate. In
the end, I wish he had been able to shed more light on the Needham question — but
it is unfair to expect him to solve a riddle that eluded Joseph Needham
himself.
A fine read — highly recommended.
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