The Man Who Loved China (20 page)

 

Before they became marooned for the winter—when the Turkestan deserts become fearfully frigid—Needham decided to send for help. He dispatched his faithful assistant, H. T., into the desert with a pair of donkeys. He told H. T. not to fret about not making it: the animals' own survival instincts, Needham tried to reassure him, would guarantee the survival of any man riding them.

H. T.'s ultimate mission—once he made sure his boss would be rescued—was to get home to Chongqing. He was supposed to ride the animals across the desert to a road where he might catch a bus, find his way by road to Lanzhou, then somehow find an airplane bound for the capital, and once there go to Needham's office and restart the work that the boss was having to ignore—supplying universities with their various needs and ordering these goods from India.

But his trip home became just as frustrating as the expedition itself.
H. T.'s bus slid into a ditch; a car he rented blew a gasket and had spark plug trouble; and when he finally reached the Lanzhou airfield he was ejected from every plane he tried to board, because all the aircraft had been commandeered to carry immense quantities of Hami melons to Chiang Kai-shek and his melon-loving wife.

He waited at the aerodrome for the better part of a month before deciding to return to Lanzhou. When he got there, he found that Needham's party had also made it that far. A crew of mechanics from a desert oil field had done some limited repairs on the engine, the truck had managed to limp to Lanzhou, and a more competent local technician there would make it ready for its 1,000-mile journey home.

There remained one small problem. Although Needham and H. T. were both in Lanzhou, Needham was south of the Yellow River and H. T. was north of it, and the bridge was down.

“So we both spent a great deal of time crossing the river each day,” wrote H. T. some years later. “I particularly enjoyed…the sheepskin raft, which gave me the sensation of sitting right on top of the churning current. As the weather got colder, chunks of ice began to appear on the water and by early December the whole river was solidly frozen. It was an awesome sight to see the mighty river turned into a solid sheet of ice, all within the space of two weeks.”

 

By early December, with Needham having done all he could in the Chinese northwest, he joined a long list of people trying to get on the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) flight. He had connections aplenty, thanks to his journeying; and after a mere two weeks of waiting, one of them finally worked the necessary wonders. Room was found on a beat-up old American warplane, and crammed in with baggage, melons, and a few other hastily boarded emergency travelers, Needham took off. At five p.m. on December 14 the plane touched down at Chongqing's sandspit of an airfield, where there was an embassy official on hand to greet him. He had expected to be away for a month: he had been gone for four.

Meanwhile, H. T. Huang had still to get home in the wounded old Chevrolet truck. It took him a further month of misery—at one stage he
ran out of lubricant and resorted to filling the engine with rapeseed oil. But in late January 1944, five and a half months after leaving, he and Needham were reunited, and the two men were able to breathe a sigh of relief, turn the truck over to the embassy garage, and never set eyes on it again.

There was one other pleasing coda to the journey—a romance which blossomed right under everybody's nose, and yet passed unnoticed by all, thanks to the journey's abundance of difficulties. Liao Hongying, the pretty young woman whom Needham had dropped off in Lanzhou, met there a visiting British diplomat, Derek Bryan. The pair had come back to Chongqing in H. T.'s truck. During the journey Bryan remarked on the discipline and efficiency of Mao Zedong's Communist soldiers—and Liao realized that he was clearly not a stuffed-shirt supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, as in her view most foreign diplomats were, but rather was “one of us, one of the people.”

They fell in love, were engaged within the month, were married soon after—and became subsequently an abiding fixture, first in Beijing and then later in England among the small corps d'élite who, during the 1950s and 1960s, campaigned in earnest and unwavering support for the ideals of the People's Republic of China.

Bryan and Hongying were not communists but, like Needham, committed socialists. Either way, though, they incurred the disfavor of the British Foreign Office, which eased Bryan from the diplomatic service in 1951 after he told an American diplomat that he rather approved of Mao Zedong's social reforms.
²⁹
They were ardent Quakers, and with Needham they later helped found the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, membership in which was one of the only ways for Britons to be permitted to enter China during its most exclusionary years. They taught Chinese,
did research, then spent their retirement in Norwich. When they died—Hongying in 1998, the ninety-two-year-old Derek Bryan in 2003—they left a considerable sum in a trust to help support Chinese students who wished to come to Britain.

 

However arduous Needham's trip to the northwest had been, its route, as far as any risk from the war was concerned, was reasonably safe. There were essentially no Japanese soldiers to the west of Chongqing, and the Japanese air raids had more or less ended by 1941.

The same could not be said of the Chinese east. By 1943 Japan was in firm control of much of eastern China from Manchuria down to a point on the coast well to the south of Shanghai; and Tokyo also held tightly on to territory that ran from the old treaty port of Xiamen southwest to the borders of Indochina—Vietnam in particular. All of southern Guangdong province—including, since the surrender on Christmas day 1941, the British crown colony of Hong Kong—was ruled strictly by the mandate of the Japanese emperor. Where the two armies met—the more or less united Nationalist and Communist armies on the Chinese side, the Japanese imperial army on the other—was the ever mobile front. Cities in this swath of contested countryside changed hands with baffling frequency and experienced fighting, bombing, and all the manifold horrors of total war.

Nearly incredibly, however, the Japanese forces let one rockbound stretch of the eastern Chinese coast, 300 miles that very roughly ran along the seashore of Fujian province, remain free of their control. There are many theories as to why, but most probably the planners had decided it was more important to go for the major manufacturing centers and transportation links and leave the more isolated and unpopulated countryside to its own devices. So although much of Fujian had been occupied briefly in the late 1930s, by 1944 it was back in Chinese hands. And halfway along the coast was the province's principal city, the former treaty port of Fuzhou; it, too, was now stubbornly under Chinese control, and continued to run as it had before the Japanese arrived.

Needham was fascinated. For one thing, it astonished him to discover a British consulate operating in Fuzhou, in territory that was almost sur
rounded by the enemy—the possibilities for espionage, or for other kinds of mischief, were surely legion. Immediately, he became curious about how the academic communities were faring in this part of China, hemmed in tightly either by the Japanese invaders to their north, west, and south, or by the sea to the east. And so, with his interest piqued by the extraordinary situation in Fuzhou, he set out once again.

He began his great “South-Eastern Journey,” as it was later to be called, in April. A few weeks earlier, his wife, Dophi, had arrived from Cambridge, to take up the post of his chemical adviser. But he chose not to take her along. His companion was once again to be H. T. Huang, and their vehicle would be a converted Chevrolet ambulance, very similar to the ill-starred wreck they had taken before, though slightly smaller and less powerful. It was similar but, crucially, it was not the same.

Map of Needham's Eastern Expedition, Chonqing–Fuzhou

In any case, because of the geography of the Japanese occupation
Needham and H. T. had to drive the truck due south
³⁰
and then get aboard a steam train. They rented a flatcar to carry the truck and hooked it onto the back of the train, and for the next five days the railway-obsessed Needham was in an adolescent rapture—“saw first train, with British-looking 2-8-0 with two day-cars and two bogie wagons.”

His enthusiasm for trains was much like his ardent devotion to young women, and in his diary he expressed the keenest interest in both almost every day. “Saw many pretty Miao girls in bright kilts”; “face of woman cooking…perfect curve under black hair”; “lovely boat-woman, strong and handsome”; “found very nice Jap-trained girl at observatory”; “shared compartment with nice girl of purest Red Indian appearance.” His excitement sometimes carried him away: the “Red Indian” girl turned out to be Chinese, from the same school Lu Gwei-djen had attended in Nanjing; and the giant 2-8-0 railway train he discovered was not British at all, but made in Czechoslovakia.

Needham and H. T. soon settled into the routine of train travel, and Needham would get off at every stop to talk to the engineer or to make notes about the various steam locomotives he spotted shunting in the yards. American and British soldiers were everywhere, helping the Chinese hold the front line against the Japanese—and in traveling to their various billets these foreigners took up most of the first-class seats and sleeping compartments.

But one advantage offset the crowding: Americans often traveled with interpreters, and if these interpreters were young women and pretty, the genial old dog from Cambridge had an opportunity to befriend them. On the first day he found Miss Zhao Baoling, a fine soprano whose seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Chinese folk songs entertained Needham for hours. H. T. felt obliged to write the lyrics down for posterity, for the archives. “It is all
research
,” Needham would say. “Sure it is,” said H. T.

There was plenty of military activity to keep the soldiers busy: few days passed without Needham's noting an air raid or some other scare suggesting that the Japanese were up to something.

Unknown to Needham and his superiors at the embassy in Chongqing, the Japanese were indeed planning something.

Tokyo had at long last wearied of the inconvenient existence of the Allied-held salient in their eastern Chinese holdings, and had ordered its local commanders to either annihilate or throttle it. And so, at almost the same moment that Needham and H. T. began their train journey toward Fuzhou, the Japanese air force and army were moved to seal off the area completely, to close the gaps that allowed the Chinese to bring men and matériel—and visiting scholars like Needham—into the region.

So just as they were venturing farther and farther into this seemingly carefree part of eastern China, the Japanese were slamming closed all the entrances and exits. If Needham didn't move swiftly, or have enormous luck, he would find himself trapped—and as a very high-value prisoner of war.

 

But he knew nothing of this, and as April ended and May began (“bush tunic and shorts this morning—first time this year”; “morning nice and hot…violent storm with rain, lightning and thunder in the afternoon”) he continued merrily on his way. Just as he had on the northwestern journey, he devoted as much time as possible to visiting universities, factories,
and schools; giving lectures; collecting shopping lists for the flights over the Hump; flying the flag; and generally keeping up morale.

But all this was much more difficult as the days wore on. The Japanese skirmishing attacks were becoming more numerous, and though no one knew why, their increased frequency was making many Chinese fretful or physically ill. A college librarian Needham met in the town of Pingshi, whom he described as “nuts, but rather nice,” was newly suffering, as was his wife, from a chronic form of malaria. “Compared photos of them in Canton before the war when she looked very spry, and they had a car as well as a house, while now they both look yellow and haggard. But he has carpentry as a hobby, and is making dolls' houses.”

Needham seemed to find amusing people everywhere he went. In one small town he reported meeting a parasitologist squirreled away in a back street, doing very little science but happy with the arrival of a dozen microscopes which had just been smuggled in from Hong Kong. At a small observatory he discovered a Princeton-educated phoneticist who had recently been captured by bandits and held for four months in a cave. In Ganxian—which is where Rewi Alley was once stationed, which Needham declared was the cleanest and most prosperous-looking city he had seen in China thus far, and which had colonnaded buildings like the center of New Delhi—he found a young Chinese man who spoke good Greek. The two had tea, and, with Needham applying his formidable linguistic abilities, “an enjoyable chat.”