THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA--BOOK REVIEW

THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA BY SIMON WINCHESTER; PUBLISHED BY HARPER COLLINS; PAGES 316; PRICE -$27.95.

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Simon Winchester, is a British author and journalist who began as a geologist and worked on oil-rigs in Africa. As a journalist he was kept prisoner by the Argentinian forces in the Falkland Islands. His book on the Oxford English Dictionary—“The Professor and the Madman” is a classic work in history. His other books “A Crack in the Edge of the World”, “Krakatoa”, “TheMap that Changed the World” were all on the New York Times Best Sellers list. SimonWinchester was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire ( O B E ) by Queen Elizabeth in 2006.
The book under review “The Man Who Loved China” is about the British biochemist and Chinese scholar Joseph Needham . Joseph Needham was one of those rare persons who are so good at so many things that they astonish us. Cambridge-educated in anatomy, physiology and chemistry, Needham became the West's leading authority on Chinese history. Needham "succeeded, as few others are ever privileged to do, in making a significant and positive change to mankind's mutual understanding.”
A simple listing of the British professor's fascinations would fill pages and would include auto mechanics, irrigation, horticulture, public health, military and political science, and Chinese calligraphy. His stupendous work, "Science and Civilisation in China", the product of 50 years of research and writing, fills 23 huge volumes. His collaborators are completing five more.
Winchester concentrates on Needham's flamboyant and eccentric character and those parts of his life which were filled with action, adventure and famous people. At Cambridge University, he pursued scientific research in biochemistry and women with equal avidity. In 1924 he married Dorothy Moyle, another biochemist, and they maintained an open marriage, which lasted until her death more than 60 years later. In 1937, Needham took as his lover, Lu Gwei-djen, a brilliant biochemist from Nanjing, and Moyle accepted her into their marriage. That arrangement, too, lasted until Moyle died and Needham married Lu. She introduced Needham to China's language and culture at a time when Japan's invasion of the country focused the West's attention and sympathy on the country.
Once Needham landed in China, he launched the research project that became the obsession that dominated the rest of his life -- the discovery and recognition of China's many early technological achievements. His research began the day he arrived in the country and ended only with his death.
Most of the narrative, however, covers Needham's adventurous and dangerous three-year stay in China during World War II. It was exciting times for him, filled with hardships, but he also met and befriended scientists, scholars, government and military leaders including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Both his work and these contacts gave him access for his research and he found evidence everywhere of the early development of sophisticated technology.
Despite his support for the Chinese revolution it was his passion for the country's past that captured him. As his research turned up early advances in Chinese science, Needham documented and made widely available to the rest of the world, the extraordinary accomplishments of an important culture.
Needham's life was a great deal more than scholarly. He was an explorer, adventurer, and womanizer whose wife and mistress remained friends for 50 years while he carried on affairs with other women in other countries. He was a communist who never joined the party — but he nearly lost his academic standing when he was taken in by a scientific hoax, organized by leaders of the Soviet Union and designed to make it appear the U.S. had committed biological warfare during the Korean War.
The love affair between Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, propelled events that would change dramatically the Western world's perceptions of China. As his mistress for life, she taught him the meticulous art of Chinese calligraphy. In studying her language, he fell in love with a country he had never seen. The outcome was the historical tome that Winchester regards, along with the Oxford English Dictionary, as one of the great intellectual achievements of all time.
Cambridge and the British Diplomatic Corps sent Needham to China to assess what the Chinese universities needed to pressure the Churchill government to provide it. It was the beginning of a lifelong quest to know everything about China and write it all down. For the rest of his life he worked "all in the consequence of his love for a Chinese woman ... to change the way the people of the West looked on the people of the East."
A puzzle often identified by historians as "Needham's question," and central to much of his work is this: Why did China, having given the world its earliest understandings of the pure sciences, having invented printing, gunpowder, the wheelbarrow, the fishing reel, chain-pumps, the magnetic compass and hundreds of other practical devices at a pace "unmatched by the world's other great civilizations including the Greeks" suddenly shut down in the 1500s? Why did this enormous country become isolated and xenophobic, just when modern science and industry began blooming in the West? Needham struggled with this mystery for decades, without a solution that suited him. According to Needham the riddle is of less consequence these days. The more urgent need, Winchester writes for both himself and Needham, is to understand as much as possible of "everything, good and ill, about the awe-inspiring, terrifying entity that is today's new China," as it moves in the direction of world supremacy.
Needham was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy. Under the Royal Society’s direction, Needham was the director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chonquing from 1942 to 1946. Needham collaborated with the historian Wang Ling , who solidified Needham's passion for Chinese scientific history.
After two years' tenure as the first head of the Natural Science division at UNESCO in Paris- indeed, it was Needham who insisted that Science should be included in the organisation's mandate — he returned to Gonville and Caius College in 1948, when Cambridge University partially funded his Science and Civilisation in China series. He devoted much energy to the history of Chinese science until his retirement in 1990, even though he continued to teach biochemistry until 1966. He also supported the controversial Chinese communist claims of American biological warfare as an inspector from 1952 to 1953 in North Korea during the Korean War He was banned by the American government from entering into American borders for 25 years. According to Simon Winchester "Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him." (, p. 212).
Needham suffered from Parkinson’s disease from 1982, and died at the age of 94 at his Cambridge home. In 2008 the Chair of Chinese in the University of Cambridge was endowed in honour of Joseph Needham.


Simon Winchester’s book reads like a thriller and is as fascinating as the life of his hero. The eminent bio-chemist and Chinese scholar has been extraordinarily lucky to get a biographer whose work will be an unique account of a person and a country , both great achievers.
P.P.Ramachandran