The Man Who Loved China (17 page)

This yellow soil gave its name to the Yellow River, into the wide valley of which Needham's trucks were now beginning to make their long, slow descent. The Yellow River, the Huang He, is yellow because it tears away from its banks a huge amount of this rich soil—1.5 billion tons each year—and carries it unstoppably down to the sea. This is the muddiest river in the world, thirty-four times as muddy as the
eau de Nil
–colored Nile. The mud, say many Chinese,
is
China. The Huang He has long been known as “China's sorrow” because the river is tearing out China's heart and pouring it into the ocean.

The soil—fine, friable, and easily plowed—is known as loess and was so named in Germany, where geologists first noticed it. The common belief is that it is the windblown relic soil of the last great Ice Age. It is thick and extensive—loess deposits are found all over central Europe and central Asia, in vast tracts of northern China, and in the central plains states of America. It is much loved by farmers, being defined by one Victorian as “a loose light soil of prodigious fertility, and the joy of the agriculturist.”

But it was not much loved by Joseph Needham, who discovered just outside Huixian that the Yellow River's tributaries are as loaded with silt and yellow loess as the great river itself. “We reached a difficult crossing—a sea of mud, the mountains dissolving like dilute brown cream. Rewi paddled and checked it.”
²⁴
Three trucks—Needham's two and one other, a
stranger—were stuck for many hours in the torrents of mud. Needham, patiently waiting it out, contented himself with photographing the peculiar waveforms in the river.

Needham noticed one other change in the landscape. The first evidence of the presence of Islam appeared just beyond the town of Huixian. “Visited the mosque…very beautiful,” he wrote in his diary. “Must be the most easterly mosque in Central Asia.” He made a drawing of it and wrote a caption with an additional description:

As it wore on, the journey became worse and worse, with the trucks behaving impossibly. Each day the party was held up because of broken head gaskets, oil leaks, transmission problems, flat tires. So accustomed were the travelers to mechanical upsets that a fractured piston or two seemed a mere bagatelle, and Needham met each episode with equanimity and good spirits. “Bought marvellous peaches,” he would write. “Sun came out. Had nice breakfast.” “Lovely rugs. Pots of flowers everywhere.” In one village he found that the people were less than fetching, being “very poor and smelly,” but he was thrilled to find that their daughters had
bound feet
. The village woman still wrapped young girls' feet in long cloths—having broken their toes, sliced into their soles, and pulled out their nails to speed the process of creating the “lotus feet” that men seemingly craved. Needham exulted over the discovery of a custom which, however barbaric, had not been completely eradicated. The republic had banned the practice from 1911 on and had ordered all women to unbind their feet—but the unbind
ing was as painful and crippling as the binding had been in the first place. Needham, while revolted, found it all fascinating.
²⁵

He kept discovering treasures that he knew would be useful for his book. “Found Song dynasty pottery shards in a fort above the village,” he recorded at one enforced halt—and then whiled away the time waiting for the mechanics to repair a water pump, or some such, by ruminating on the methods of early Chinese ceramicists, and of how their techniques of throwing, glazing, and firing had been much more advanced in China in Song times—the tenth and eleventh centuries after Christ—than they had been in Europe. Lord Macartney's China trade expedition of 1792 had brought newly created pottery from Josiah Wedgwood's factory in Etruria as a gift for the Chinese emperor: small wonder, Needham noted, that the emperor huffily refused to accept the pieces—English ceramics must have seemed primitive to him in comparison with the Chinese porcelain of the day. (Some scholars offer an alternative explanation for the emperor's refusal. By deigning to accept the gift of Wedgwood he would have been tacitly admitting that the English ware perhaps actually
was
of a quality equal to that made by his homegrown craftsmen. Such an admission would have resulted in a loss of face for every ceramicist in the empire.)

But then, as the problems with the trucks worsened, the mood turned more bleak. The head gasket blew again, and this time they had no more spares because—to Needham's intense chagrin—Eric Teichman's driver had taken them all. “Triple damn old Tai,” the diary notes—the only profanity seen so far. There would be more.

That night they had to sleep in a room with a pig, which didn't improve Needham's temper. The next morning they tried to fashion a new gasket, first by hammering flat Rewi Alley's aluminum shaving-soap dish
and covering it with cork. This blew out at the precise moment the truck was trying to cross a shallow stream. They were stuck in the middle when, alarmingly, another truck went by with the passengers all shouting “Flood! Flood!”—and sure enough within moments the stranded flagship of the Sino-British Science Cooperation Office expedition was under eight feet of water, and what had been merely immobile was now inundated, to boot.

The next day they hauled the damp, damnable Chevrolet out of the mire and made another new gasket, this time out of an old canvas bag. It lasted for just five minutes. “NBG,” wrote Needham: “No bloody good.” Needham and H. T. then left the truck altogether and hitchhiked, riding first, and very uncomfortably for about sixty miles, on top of an unstable clutch of gasoline drums in the back of an army transport: it rained and was intensely cold and the pair huddled miserably under a tarpaulin—Needham wishing, no doubt, for a cozy fire and tea and crumpets in his rooms at Caius. The truck driver eventually dropped them off at a junction; they took a rickshaw to a village called Lizhishi; found an Indian-made gasket for sale; hitchhiked back again: and were at their own truck by nightfall. The mechanic installed the gasket, and the truck worked perfectly. But then Needham developed a crippling toothache, which put him out of action for two more days.

Eventually they crossed into Gansu province, and after another day reached its biggest city, Lanzhou, a dire place best known today as the most polluted city in the world. In Needham's time it was known for another reason: it was one of the few places where a bridge crossed the Yellow River, and this bridge might be sturdy enough to take the convoy of trucks. If Needham crossed the river and turned left, then he would be on the old Silk Road, and well on the way to Dunhuang and the caves.

By the time they wheezed gingerly across the half-broken bridge into Lanzhou, everyone in the party was tired and dejected. Being mostly British and therefore generally phlegmatic, they elected to stay put awhile, so that full repairs could be carried out on their vehicles. They would replace all the doubtful-looking gaskets, springs, oil pumps, and piston connecting rods that had plagued them since Chengdu; and to do the work they hired a man named Liu who, it was claimed, was the finest mechanic in the Chinese northwest. Needham, his tooth recovered, promptly took off to explore.

For the two weeks of his enforced stay in Lanzhou he buried himself in as much book-related science and technology as he could find. He talked to biologists at the Epidemic Prevention Bureau, to a man who made windmills and was trying to detect water underground with a technique more sophisticated than dowsing, to experts on potato viruses and horse illnesses and to vets who knew all about the strange problems that afflict sheep in the Gobi Desert. Needham looked around a machine works, a dry battery factory, a flour mill, a power station, and a hospital so modern that the lights in its operating room had mirrors incorporated inside them, the better to illuminate the patient. He took a raft across the Yellow River to see some people called Bairnsfather, found others with unusual names—a bishop named Buddenbrook, an American named Lowdermilk—and noted with pleasure that at the local technical school a man from Java was teach
ing two boys from the Tibetan frontier about engineering drawings, while a Chinese-Tibetan girl was doing the accounts.

He also did a series of routine, quotidian, and generally pleasant things—he had a haircut, bought himself a sheepskin coat and a set of wonderfully warm Gung Ho blankets, and stumbled across a German mission library where he luxuriated in being able to read year-old newspapers from Berlin. He found cartons of cheap but tasty Russian cigarettes and locally made, less tasty fat cigars. He also had soapstone seals carved with his Chinese name and various honorifics.
²⁶
He ate moon cakes (during the Chinese autumn festival, which took place while he was marooned), and bought wool and darned his own socks. Finally, he had a tailor run up some khaki cotton trousers, and wearing these and his freshly polished Sam Browne belt, took the local American consul out to dinner in a Muslim restaurant.

But Needham was also rather frightened, by a number of unsettling experiences and by a torrent of highly unsettling dreams.

Lanzhou was a city poised uneasily between battlefields, where conflicts of one kind or another were invariably in full flood—fights between Japanese and Chinese, between Nationalists and Communists, between untamed warlords, between frontier tribal rivals, between Russian invaders and frontier protection authorities. All of these left sad, struggling human detritus in their wake. Needham reported seeing, for example, large numbers of captured rebel soldiers “tied like hogs” and being led off to be shot. He saw “a tall country girl” trying to offer one of these wretches a bundle, before being struck full in the face by a guard's rifle and told to be off. He saw what he referred to as a “trachoma squad” of bewildered soldiers from Sichuan, who appeared to have no idea where they were and behaved like “the blind leading the blind.” He came across groups of malnourished, waiflike children, military camp followers who, he noted with
distress, kept dying overnight. Eighty-eight of them died during one particularly ghastly stop, according to Rewi Alley.

After days of distressing sights like these, it was perhaps not entirely surprising that Needham's sleep suffered, and that his nights were interrupted with bizarre imaginings. As it happens, though, his nightmares had no obvious connection to the miseries of China, but were in fact all related to anxieties over his life in Cambridge. One of them was quite simple—he dreamed he had lost his readership in biochemistry, that he was arguing with the people at his laboratory, and that he thought he might not be allowed to come back to England once his stint in China was done. This was perhaps due to his anxiety over air travel, which he hated and had to steel himself to undertake.

Another dream he found less obviously explicable. He had been standing on a railway platform with his wife, Dophi—the notation in his China diary relating to her is in Greek, as was his custom—when an express train flashed past, collided with a vehicle, and threw out a woman's body, “which splashed.” Seven other women then rose up, one from between the railway lines, and, terrified, they all rushed away. Then soldiers came, and Needham tried in vain to find the stationmaster to tell him what had taken place. “It was all very vivid and startling,” he notes. “Was it a premonition of danger?”

If nothing else these dreams—and there would be others, especially when the nighttime weather in China was dramatically bad—reminded Needham that, however irritating the daily difficulties of travel, his life in China provided him with a great escape. The professional and domestic trials of his everyday academic and domestic life were far away and out of sight—and if his subconscious chose once in a while to nudge his elbow and force him to think of Cambridge, of biochemistry, of his religious convictions, of his mother (who by now was near death), of his wife and his mistress, and perhaps of the consequences of his normally careless liking for sexual adventure—then perhaps it was a small price to pay. A few bad nights in exchange for a life of such license as he now enjoyed seemed a bargain, he later wrote, that most would be willing to accept.

 

They left Lanzhou, their truck supposedly mended, in the middle of September. The team's makeup had changed somewhat. Ed Beltz, the American geologist whom Needham had very much liked—he was “49, an excellent chap, and tough”—had left to work at an oilfield in Gansu province. Liao Hongying, the beautiful chemist from Somerville, had opted to stay behind in Lanzhou, ostensibly to help in a local school. And Sir Eric Teichman had gone off, too, bound for the far frontier. Needham was sorry to see him go, for although his high-handedness (particularly in the matter of requisitioning trucks and drivers) had caused some inconvenience, his intelligence and courage were of the first water.