The fantastic story of the eccentric scientist who unlocked the mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

I honestly can’t recall my earliest introductions to China, though I lived there for nine years. What I do recall is taking a “Chinese Culture” class in college, because I thought I might eventually move there for a summer ESL program, but that class didn’t even teach me “Nihao.” I did learn how to pick up peanuts with chopsticks, so that counted for something.

While I learned none of the Chinese language in that course, I did learn some valuable lessons about China’s vast history, and included with that was an introduction to the man who made certain the Western World knew that history well, Professor Joseph Needham of Cambridge University.

This book chronicles the life of this real-life Renaissance Man of the mid-twentieth Century. In it we learn how Needham, after a brief introduction to the Chinese language through his lifelong Chinese mistress, moved to China for a relatively short time during the Second World War, and while there, became enamored by the nation’s culture and history. Specifically, he was awed by their technological methods and their scientific advancements, for while the Chinese understood much and were obviously gifted in their own technological processes, their methods differed greatly from those in the West. Needham wondered how long this people with a vast history had been doing such things as tree-grafting in their own unique way and why their methods had never mixed with those of the West.

This thirst for understanding started Needham off on an adventure of learning that would take him the rest of his life to complete—and even then, he wasn’t quite yet done. Needham’s writings came to be titled Science and Civilization in China, of which he wrote seven total volumes before his death. The work continued, however, because so did China, and as of this year a full 27 volumes have been completed.

In these volumes, Needham chronicled the history of the world’s most ancient culture and civilization in such depth that even China’s own scholars were baffled by his insight. In rescuing ancient books from the burn piles and dust heaps of history, he was able to piece together a massive prosaic encyclopedia of Chinese inventions, methods, technologies, and advances which answered some of the world’s greatest mysteries. Most striking, for example, was the evidence he helped uncover that China’s discovery of printing with ink on wooden blocks predated Gutenberg by a full millennium. Can you imagine that?

In highlighting this fact, though, Needham raises an important question, not so much about why the world hadn’t ever recognized this ancient Chinese invention of the printing press, but why China itself had forgotten all about it as well. After all, Gutenberg can’t be shamed for having “re-invented the wheel,” when the guy who first invented “the wheel” ten centuries earlier didn’t think it was all that great.

The elements of this question make up what’s come to be known as “The Needham Question.” As Winchester summarizes:

“Why,”  Needham asked, “if the Chinese had been so technologically creative for so very long and if they invented so much in antiquity, why did modern science develop not in China but in Europe and the West? Why was China unable to hold on to its early advantage and creative edge? Why was there never a true Industrial Revolution in China? Why was there no firm embrace of capitalism? Why by the 18tha nd 19th centuries was China a nation known principally for being backward, hostile, and poor? How did the brilliant and early nation evolve into Emerson’s later ‘booby nation’?” (Epilogue)

He never quite found the answer to this riddle, and the question persists even to this day. One surmise, however, is that the past several centuries of China’s “backwardness” is but a blip in their vast history, a minor hiccup, that proving to have been not all that serious, now that China has become once more a vast global superpower. Is she, after having opened herself to the world in recent decades, destined to close in upon herself one more, the world’s largest (though certain not most deranged) reclusive nation?

Another suggested answer to this riddle is that in closing herself off to the world, China became satisfied with the status quo—at least since about A.D. 1500, when the apparent shift from East to West is thought to have taken place. The West’s advancements from that time on were immense and often, mainly because of the strength of competition between the nations, each of whom want to bigger, stronger, faster, and more productive than the rest. This atmosphere of competition is something a loner nation is unable to enjoy.

The Joseph Needham we meet on these pages was a man capable of thinking big thoughts like these, and yet also of focusing in on the minutest details. Simon Winchester, too, tackled an immense project in this book, but fills these pages with fascinating anecdotes and details that makes this book a joy to read. I’m glad there wasn’t too much about Needham’s womanizing ways and nudist tendencies, though these elements are certainly present. But I am happy that Winchester to extra care to describe Needham’s Communist tendencies and his support of Chairman Mao even through some of China’s darker times.

The man truly loved China, and while I may never get to those 15,000 pages of Science and Civilization in China, I am glad for this introduction to the works and the hard process of research and writing behind it. This was an enjoyable biography to read.

©2022 E.T.

Read More from Simon Winchester:

• A Crack in the Edge of the World (2005)
• The Man Who Loved China (2008)