In 1793, Parliament sent Lord George Macartney to meet the Qing Emperor. The British were frustrated with the trade restrictions the Chinese held them to and sought to open up the nation. Macartney, believing that China today had only “the ruins of a state of civilization,” aimed to awe him with British inventions. He sailed to Beijing with elaborate clocks, globes, fine textiles, porcelain, weapons, telescopes, and steam pumps.
The response? “These things are good enough to amuse children.”
And his subsequent letter to the British King: “We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenous, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.” “Now England is paying homage…though their tribute is commonplace, my heart approves entirely. Curios and the boasted ingenuity of their devices I prize not.”
This response didn’t compute to Macartney. His nation had just kicked off the Industrial Revolution and was leading Europe in manufactures. He saw the Qianlong Emperor as ignorant of his nation’s true interests, like many others holding China in “disdain, contempt, and exasperation.” But in fact, the Emperor reflected the confidence of a people that had spent a millennium outpacing the west in science and technology.
The West’s ignorance of China’s scientific innovation continued into the mid-1950s. One man, Joseph Needham, is responsible for educating the world about China’s greatest technical feats. In The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester gives the reader a brisk and engaging tour of the remarkable scholar’s life.
A precocious Cambridge biochemistry professor by his mid-twenties, he didn’t turn to China until later in his career. Though already married, he had his heart stolen in 1937 by a younger scientist Lu Guizhen (魯桂珍) who traveled from Nanjing expressly to research under him and his then wife.
He quickly fell in love with both her and the language. The first word to enchant him was the Chinese word for cigarette, xiāngyān or 香烟. The two characters mean ‘fragrant’ and ‘smoke,’ which he found infinitely more evocative than the English word. He was later to say that studying Chinese was for him like “going for a swim on a hot day, for it got you entirely out of the prison of alphabetical words and into the glittering crystalline one of ideographic characters.”
But what he learned wasn’t all for poetry. Diving into his old study notes, Winchester found that the first ‘V’ words Needham learned included ‘vagina, value, vanish, vegetable, virtue, virgin, and vulgar.’
A few years into the Sino-Soviet war, the British grew horrified not just by atrocities like the Rape of Nanking but the deliberate hobbling of the Chinese academic system. The Japanese army expressly bombed universities and killed professors. For support, Churchill in 1942 approved of a mission led by Needham to supply Chinese scholars with funds and instruments necessary to continue teaching and research.
Two years in, living in Chongqing, he wrote to his lover:
“It’s been a time of much confusion, but for that very reason I’ve been able to penetrate everywhere into the lives of villages and towns, and bend my solitary steps into Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist temples, often deserted, able therefore to savor to the full the great beauty of the traditional architecture in its setting of age old trees and forgotten gardens. I’ve been free to experience the life of Chinese homes and marketplaces, and see it firsthand the miseries of a society in collapse in wait of a dawn that must soon come…What gastronomic delights I’ve found, and often from stalls in village streets.”
For the following six years, Needham lived in Chongqing and travelled across China meeting and funding academics. Following his father’s maxim that “no knowledge is wasted knowledge,” he grew fascinated by how Chinese did most things a little differently. He wanted to understand this history of why the Chinese farmed, counted, and built the way they did.
Sending thousands of books back to Cambridge, he spent the rest of his life to writing the story of China’s innovations. At the time of the first volume’s release in 1954, he though confident of his scholarship feared the book’s reception. He had a ‘Hans Blix’ moment going to China in the early 1950s as a biological weapons inspector where he fell for a joint PRC-Soviet ruse to make it look like the Americans were dropping cholera-infested rats from warplanes. In McCarthy-era America, was banned from visiting the US.
But, as he was fond of saying, “the dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.” His Science and Civilisation in China quickly was hailed as a masterpiece of scholarship, fundamentally reshaping the global story of scientific progress. His work has given rise to the ‘Needham Question’, namely why China lost its lead.
Winchester spends too much time on Needham’s curious personal life and academic infighting at Cambridge at the expense of the scholarly questions he devoted his life to. Instead of explaining how and why the Chinese were so inventive, he simply writes a few handwavy paragraphs listing their accomplishments compared to the West’s. He gives just three pages to looking at the Needham Question!
I have written my fair share of fellowship essays pledging to support “mutual understanding” while having zero faith that I’ll ever be able to do so. But, as Winchester points out, Needham really did succeed in this regard. “All in consequence of his love of a Chinese woman, Needham had worked singlehandedly to change the way the people of the west look on the people of the east.”