The Man Who Loved China (21 page)

Needham might have been justified in describing the malarial librarian as “nuts,” but his own oddities frequently surfaced, as H. T. discovered time and again. In Ganxian, for example, Needham's unusual breakfasts caused comment and some consternation. He always liked his morning toast burned black. The charcoal, he said, brought inestimable benefits to his stomach. The cook at the China Travel Service inn, where they were staying, had his own ideas on what constituted properly made toast and he served it to Needham brown. Three times an increasingly impatient Needham sent the toast back to the kitchen, and the matter was not resolved until H. T. applied the invaluable combination of diplomacy and chemistry that described his job. “We have here a famous and very eccentric Professor from England,” he explained. “Please tell the chef not to worry about get
ting the toasts burnt. That is the way he really likes them—and the carbon is good for his digestion.”

In mid-May the car needed repairs—they had retrieved it from the train and were now driving over the Fujianese hills, which Needham said reminded him of the Jura—and so they took the opportunity to have it looked at while they waited for local flooding to subside. For three days they had nothing to do and no visits to make, so Needham, ever a man for improving each shining hour, decided to translate some Chinese folk songs into English while keeping the original meter (the exercise proved woefully unsuccessful), and to teach some passing Chinese lovelies how to sing the three songs he knew best: “Gaudeamus igitur,” the communist “Internationale,” and the “Horst Wessel Song,” a tune then beloved of all good Nazis.

He also wondered briefly—while being interrogated by a Chinese chemist he met—about a supposedly distinguished British scientist whom the Chinese gentleman was certain was named Queenie Woggin. After some head-scratching Needham realized he was being asked about Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, an expert on fungi who went on to be head of the women's branch of the British army. She most certainly had a queenly manner, which he supposed might have accounted for the error. Walking swiftly away from his interrogator, he fell into a hole in the road, up to his neck, a feat which he later said greatly amused everyone, particularly the women. He took himself off to a neighbor's verandah to restore his bruised dignity, lit his evening cigar, and spent an hour gazing in rapture over the blue hills of Fujian, the masses of rhododendrons trembling in the cooling breeze, the scent of gardenia in the air.

He wrote down, quite simply, that China, at moments like this, was surely the loveliest place on earth.

Finally, after they had spent a month on the road, their destination was in sight. Wearying of driving over mountain ranges, they decided to travel to Fuzhou—an island of westernized civility set down in a sea of Japanese malevolence—on a steam-powered riverboat. The Min courses placidly down to the sea from its source in the Jura-like mountains to the west, and Fuzhou sits foursquare at its mouth—so a boat was a far more reliable
means of getting to the town, and Needham loved boats almost as much as he loved trains.

While he was waiting for the steamboat in the riverside town of Nan-ping he happened—again, typically—on an American whom he thought of principally as an ornithologist, John Caldwell. Needham, an amateur bird-watcher, had long owned a copy of Caldwell's definitive work
The Birds of South China
. More officially, however, John Caldwell, China-born and a native speaker of Chinese, was something else altogether.

Ostensibly he was employed as a journalist for the U.S. Office of War Information. But in fact, like many of the racy, mysterious foreigners who then operated in this part of China, he was a spy. And he was quite a talkative, matter-of-fact spy. He seemed to know what was going on locally, and felt that all of a sudden the situation seemed ominous. There were, he warned Needham, faint—but to him unmistakable—indications of a gathering storm. He told Needham that he was “getting jumpy” and was preparing to evacuate his father and mother, who lived nearby. It was a subtly coded message that Needham well understood: from now on, be very, very careful; the Japanese were planning something.

Yet whatever it was, Needham still had a mission to accomplish for the Crown. The boat to Fuzhou left in the dark on the appointed day, Needham sitting happily in the bow as it lurched down the infamous rapids of the Min. The voyage took a little over twelve hours, and the first man he met when the boat tied up at the Fuzhou docks that afternoon turned out to be a spy also. This time, though, his new acquaintance was a British spy: Murray MacLehose, who at the time of their meeting was on a top-secret mission. Eventually, MacLehose would manage to escape from the murky business of espionage and embark on a glorious and very public diplomatic career.

Murray, later Lord, MacLehose was a giant of a Scotsman who spent almost all of his life—aside from a brief spell in the late 1960s when he was unaccountably made British ambassador to Denmark—working in the East, and who ended his career as probably the most fondly remembered of all the colonial governors of Hong Kong. At the start of his working life, when he joined the Malayan civil service, he was sent to the Chinese treaty
port of Xiamen, then known as Amoy, a couple of hundred miles down the coast from Fuzhou, where he was now posted, and where he could learn the local coastal dialect of Hokkienese. But in December 1941 the Japanese captured Amoy and hauled off whatever British diplomats they could find, including MacLehose. At first they interned the British; then, accepting the terms of the Geneva Convention, they called in the Red Cross as an intermediary and sent them all home to Britain.

MacLehose might have remained at home, except that the wily old men of the British intelligence services had other plans. They decided to send this ambitious, impressive-looking, linguistically competent young Scot right back to China—to the port of Fuzhou, which was still free. He would work there under cover of being the British vice-consul and would train Chinese guerrillas to operate behind Japanese lines and carry out sabotage. This was what he was doing, officially but covertly, when he and Needham first met, beside the old Fuzhou river bridge in May 1944.

Because of the secret nature of this work, Needham chose to remove all material relating to MacLehose—who was arguably one of the most interesting and celebrated Britons Needham ever encountered in China—from all his subsequent published works on China. “The following morning we took the river-steamer down to Fuzhou,” he writes in his book
Science Outpost
, “where we spent an enjoyable five days. The narrative resumes after our return.” And that was that.

Even the few references to MacLehose and to the British consul, Keith Tribe, that appear in Needham's private and unpublished diaries are fairly circumspect, and anodyne. He says that MacLehose took him to stay in the consulate in the old Foreign Concession—which reminded him of Clapham, where he grew up. He writes that it was a lovely old property full of objets d'art, and that H. T., being Chinese, was asked to stay in a hotel across the street. He says his bedroom was enormous, with a very large bathroom. They had tea—rolls, honey, jam—and he could close his eyes and imagine himself back home.

The men then evidently went on to have a grand old time. They had elaborate massages; took a junk out to the Pagoda Anchorage, where the China tea clippers used to take on cargo; spent time at the still elegant Fuzhou Club, whose bar was frequented by prosperous western swells; vis
ited a number of the lacquer and ceramics factories for which the city is famous; and dined on fish with the equally well known Fuzhou sauce of fermented red rice and wine, the making of which—the mash contained
Monascus
yeasts—excited Needham greatly (he noted down the details for his book). They also visited two great antiquarian bookshops for which Fuzhou was well-known.

Needham had to purchase two enormous rattan trunks in which to ship all the volumes (including fifty-six that were presented to him by members of the Fuzhou Club) back to Chongqing. Most were devoted to the history of Chinese science, and all are still housed in Cambridge today, in the great East Asian science library he accumulated over the years.

All told, the five days passed in a whirlwind of activity, much of it undertaken with Murray MacLehose—and yet Needham did not leave behind one remark, either in his published book or his private diaries, relating either to their conversations or to the vice-consul's duties. Once in a while the man's initials appear, as in “lunched with MM” or “MM at dinner”—but that was all. Others get much fuller treatment: a Mr. Pearson is described as “pompous and talkative,” Keith Tribe as “interesting and nice.” But there is nothing of Murray MacLehose.

 

And then Needham and H. T. set out for home—this time, because of the reports from the consulate (and presumably from the two spies) that the Japanese were now bent on quickly closing the net.

It was a race. Almost every town they passed through had already been visited by Japanese bombers whose crews were softening up targets ahead of an infantry push. They often had to take long diversions to get around ruined buildings and broken roads. On May 29, the Chinese state radio broadcast the news that a Japanese offensive had started—and within hours the highways began to choke with panicked refugees, and the air came alive with waves of aircraft, mostly American and Chinese, heading west and north to head off the enemy incursions.

Needham still insisted on visiting places of interest—a tungsten mine here, a gasworks there, an epidemiology laboratory in this town, an experimental farm there—but H. T. was pressing him ever onward. H. T. under
stood Hokkienese, as Needham did not, and was fully aware of the growing danger. The crucial point on the journey came with their attempted crossing of the great Xiang River bridge at the city of Hengyang—a crossing they had accomplished without a moment's thought three weeks before.

Now the Japanese were licking at their heels, and for the first time Joseph Needham's legendary calm showed signs of crumbling. If they didn't cross this bridge ahead of the Japanese, they would be trapped, imprisoned, interned—or very much worse. Usually he was indifferent to the vicissitudes of war, preferring to read his
Chinese-English Dictionary
as the attacks went on. But now, on June 2, he called a council of war with H. T. He had wanted to visit a number of factories in the provincial government center of Taiho, but he was worried. He wrote in his journal: “Even if Changsha holds out, there may be severe dislocation of traffic at Hengyang, preventing us getting to the west with our truck and the valuable records so far. So decided—not to go.” They now had to make for the bridge, or bust.

They heard alarming reports—that Hengyang had been bombed continuously for three days; that the Americans had bombed and destroyed twenty-two Japanese steam locomotives at Hankou; and, most ominously, that Japanese troops were racing north from Guangzhou to meet those streaming south from north of the Yangzi, and the two armies would soon meet in a giant all-crushing pincer movement. Needham started taking all this very seriously, at times even listening to the radio—“I can hear the American plane pilots and the ground staff talking!” he exclaimed excitedly.

They decided to race for the bridge. They stopped briefly at a second tungsten mine and watched men washing the wolframite from the crushed quartz—H. T. grinding his teeth in frustration—but then pressed on, the urgency growing by the hour, the situation becoming ever more perilous.

The steam engine strained slowly up the final range of hills before beginning its slow coast down into the Xiang River valley. From time to time it would stop unexpectedly, sometimes because of air raids, sometimes to allow passengers in their long gowns to clamber unsteadily down to the tracks and scuttle off into villages hidden in the woods. Each time they stopped, though, many more would-be passengers were clamoring to be let on the train, to escape the steady progress of the Japanese infantry. Needham and H. T. made way for newcomers until their compartment was crammed with sweating, frightened humanity; with baggage; and with a variety of farm animals. From time to time Needham tried to lead the refugees in song to keep their spirits up—but they were too nervous, and most of them kept staring anxiously out of the dirt-encrusted windows. Above all else they loathed the Japanese, and were gripped by fear at just what the troops might do.