Customer Reviews

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

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There are 2 facets of Simon Winchesters work that make him one of my favorite authors. Firstly, he brings amazing players in History forward that I very often have never heard of. Secondly, he makes reading History tremendously fascinating. The latter should be a given, how can our past be anything but fascinating? The reality is that History books can be painful to read.

Noel Joseph Terrence Montgomery Needham is the subject of Mr. Winchesters 19th work, sound familiar? Not to me. However by the end of the book I look forward to seeking out more about this man as Mr. Winchester has a knack for catalyzing a readers interest well beyond the book he offers. Professor Needham was a astonishing man who filled his 94 years with remarkable travels, eccentric behavior and a decision so poor the reader will ask was he a fool or a knave? (Question posed by the author)

What is not in dispute is the marvelous history of China Professor Needham documented through first hand investigation over thousands of miles traveled in China (many in war time) and the decades of research that followed. The only other historian that comes to mind as being so single minded in his pursuit of a subject is Sir Martin Gilbert and his decades long work on Sir Winston Spencer Churchill.

The work is also timely as it coincides with Chinas re-entry as a focal point for the world. Chinas existence is best measured in millennia and her scientific contributions when listed are nearly as long and often pre-date conventional wisdom on who was first with a given invention. Think you know where printing was first documented, suspension bridges first built, how about the compass, blood circulation or perhaps a flame-thrower?

Chinas recent history is no indicator of its fantastic past and may more likely be an indicator of what is yet to come. This is another great read by a wonderful author who never disappoints.

Over the past decade, the English biographer, Simon Winchester, has become famous for probing the lives of the certifiably delusional, the mildly eccentric, the politically obsessed and the naturally traumatized. His latest offering, "The Man Who Loved China", is no different. If you read it, you will be treated to a story that encompasses two continents, the brilliant notions of an intellectual dedicated to bringing the past into line with the present, and a 20th century world rivened by ideological conflict. The life of Cambridge University's Dr. Joseph Needham - socialist, free-thinker, and polymath extraordinaire - becomes that focus in which you will move through modern times on a path rarely traveled. For starters, Winchester introduces us to the obscure beginnings of Needham: no great distinction here except an early propensity for languages resulting from his photographic memory and an identification with the underdog. As he became ensconced in academic life as a university don at Caius College, he developed an interest in the study of Chinese antiquity, namely the Middle Kingdom. Along came WW II when Needham finally got his chance to make a big impact on civilization. He was commissioned by the Churchill government to go to China as a leading expert on Chinese history (not a sinologist)to collect and catalogue important manuscripts before they fell into the hands of the invading Japanese armies. This mission was to take months of grueling and fascinating criss-crossing of China; the description of which will boggle the human imagination in terms of what Needham was searching for: why didn't the much vaunted Chinese technology ever make it to the West? You have to read to find the answer to that mystery. The book concludes with some interesting asides to Needham's political, academic and personal lives. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to be challenged as to the meaning of history in modern times.

everything this man writes is excellent. This book is no exception. You will have hours of genuine entertainment ahead of you. I only wish I had not read it so that I could start it again.

In "The Man Who Loved China", Simon Winchester tells us the beguiling and utterly fascinating story of Joseph Needham - a lifelong learner, a libidinous lover, a licentious libertine, a pro-active left-wing Communist sympathizer, a linguist, a larger than life collection of laughably loopy eccentricities verging on the lunatic and now the little known but paradoxically near legendary author of "Science and Civilization in China".

This seminal work, this magnum opus, Needham's life work - spanning 50 years in the preparation and still incomplete at his death in 1995 - was, in essence, to burst the bubble of the West's parochial conceit that we are the birthplace of all that is important in science and technology.

Life as an accomplished, well-respected biochemist on the faculty of Cambridge University simply wasn't enough for the awesome intellect of an insatiable polymath like Joseph Needham. His love affair with the history of the Middle Kingdom began concurrently with a blossoming extra-marital love for Lu Gwei-djen, one of his students. This affair, conducted in a curiously open manner for such a staunchly staid, conservative and venerable institution as Cambridge, was, equally curiously, accepted and tolerated by Dorothy Needham, his wife and scientific colleague, for the duration of all three of their lives. As Lu Gwei-djen taught him her language, Needham dove headlong into an intense exploration of China's rich, sophisticated and exciting culture and history.

"The Man Who Loved China" is Needham's exciting story that reads with all the intensity and passion of the most exciting thrillers - the story of the birth of his love for all things Chinese; his initial explorations of a Chinese countryside torn by war with imperial Japan in the 1940s that were frequently fraught with adventure and even danger; his discovery of the astonishing history of Chinese intellectual wealth whose advancements in science and technology pre-dated those of the west by hundreds of years; and his political missteps as he is branded a Communist by McCarthy's propaganda machine and banished from the USA.

Winchester also delves deeply into the scientific exploration of what has come to be called the "Needham question", the curious fact that despite China's prior ability to advance at an almost dizzying speed in such diverse fields as printing, explosives, navigation, hydraulics, ceramics and statecraft, its intellectual capacity fell into an almost completely moribund torpor around the time of the Renaissance, precisely the time when science in the west began the current acceleration which, for all intents and purposes, has never slowed down!

Simon Winchester has also taken us one step beyond Needham's work. In a wonderful compelling epilogue, readers are treated to an informative tour of contemporary China and left with the open-ended question as to whether its newly accelerating pace of development will continue and how China will interact with other nations on the world stage.

As readable as any novel, "The Man Who Loved China" is brilliantly organized, wonderfully paced, and more than complete enough while it also cleverly sidesteps the biographer's mind-numbing trap of listing tedious arcane details. Exciting narrative descriptions of action sequences, near poetic passages of scenery, cityscapes, sights and smells that seem to vividly leap off of the page directly into the reader's minds-eye and even realistic dialogue, make Winchester's work a five star story that even the most non-fiction phobic reader could enjoy! It is a certainty that Winchester's "The Man Who Loved China" will give birth to its own progeny - a second generation of lovers that will continue with Needham's exploration of this unique culture.

Well done. Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

I bought this book quite a long time ago. I didn't order it because I had any particular interest in Joseph Needham (indeed, I had never heard of him) but rather because I had read a few other books by this author and wanted to read more. For some reason I don't now recall (unexpected travel or other priority commitment, perhaps), I got sidetracked after just beginning the book and I had to set it aside. Months later, I came across the book again and couldn't recall what it was about or why I had stopped reading it. I assumed I had not enjoyed what I read thus far and almost did not resume the read... I am very glad I ignored my initial impulse and started to re-read it again because it was a very riveting tale.

I'm tempted to say that this is be the best of Winchester's book that I have read so far (with the possible exception of The Professor And The Madman). The focus here is on a single individual but it spans both a lifetime and a globe and introduces the reader to all sorts of interesting secondary characters, some of whom are already famous in other contexts and some who would otherwise remain forgotten. I don't know if I actually care to go read more about Joseph Needham elsewhere (although I might like to read a volume or to of his 'magnum opus'), but I can say that this particularly biography entertained and diverted me for quite a number of hours.

Winchester's account of Joseph Needham shows a Needham-esque fascination with intricate detail -- be it the social world of Edwardian England or the topography of western China. At the same time the author shares Needham's enthusiasm for enormous questions -- How much does the Western world owe to Eastern ingenuity? What accounts for the flaring up or dying down of a society's intellectual drive? All told, the book gives a highly thought-provoking love story. You gotta admire a guy whose passion for a Chinese woman led him to tear down walls of prejudice between civilizations.

I recently listened to my first China audio-book, The Man Who Loved China, by Simon Winchester. I had heard about this book, but admit the title put me off. I wasn't aware it was written by the same author who penned The River at the Center of the World. In fact, I wasn't aware who Simon Winchester was. It turns out he's been writing since the early seventies (having begun as a travel writer) and has become very good at it, not to mention successful. He has a refined and fluid style and is apparently best-known for his The Professor and the Madman.

The subject of The Man Who Loved China is one Joseph Needham (1900-1995). Needham was many things, but first and foremost he was scientist, a biochemist at Cambridge. He was also a polyglot, a nudist, a communist, a womanizer, a chain smoker, a folk dancer, a car enthusiast (and speed freak), and a hopeless dreamer.

Needham's interest in China was born out of a relationship with one of his female students, who would become his mistress of 50 years - with his wife's grudging assent. China had been misrepresented in the West, Needham's mistress informed him, and eventually the professor decided to travel there, a sojourn that lasted four years.

As Winchester's title suggests, Needham became smitten with China and everything in it. He began to study the language and embarked on a series of cultural and scientific expeditions, recording them in his diary. It didn't take long for the Englishman to come to the conclusion that the Middle Kingdom had once been a highly advanced and scientific society, one responsible for hundreds of inventions, if not the very foundation of science. He returned to China later and began to write Science and Civilisation in China, a 17-volume endeavour chronicling these achievements. The work would go on to win great academic acclaim.

Needham's initial visit to China coincided with a rather dangerous set of circumstances: World War II, or the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945. Much of the time, Needham was stationed in Chongqing (or Chungking), the capital of Free China. Because of this, his blossoming China curiosity seems itself a curiosity. The majority of foreigners living in or visiting Chongqing, including Ernest Hemingway, reported that it was a filthy, depressing dump, full of death and disease. Raw sewage from a million inhabitants coursed into the Yangtze, the municipal water supply. Every morning, bodies had to be cleared from the streets, and hot-tempered locals made no bones about how much they disliked the foreign influx and the "downriver people" (refugees fleeing the Japanese). And this batch of unflattering descriptions says nothing of governmental venality and incompetence. British officials in Chongqing reported to London that the Nationalist government did not have "a firm grasp on the situation." Americans reporting to Washington were more blunt, stating that Chinese authorities were little better than grafters and crooks.

But none of this is mentioned in The Man Who Loved China. And none of it seemed to faze Joseph Needham - if he even noticed.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Imperial army was slaughtering whole Chinese divisions and bombing cities to smithereens. Needham might have asked himself why practically all Nationalist Army matériel was imported from the West, or why China barely had an airforce. He also might have pondered why rich Chinese were driving Japanese-made cars in between Japanese bombing raids. Faced with such unflattering facts, recorded by dozens of foreign observers, Joseph Needham retreated into the depths of imagination, conjuring a complex and idealized China, a sort of Golden Age, one that almost certainly never existed.

During one of his fact-finding expeditions, Needham discovered some "measuring instruments" in a cave sheltered from Japanese bombs. He concluded, with a childlike glee, that such instruments must have been widely disseminated, more evidence of China's scientific supremacy. We know from Needham's diaries that he made dozens of similar inferences. Someone told him the Chinese had exported a variety of chess to Europe through the Middle East, hence its origin, and Needham took it to be true. But chess originated in India. There were the usual Chinese inventions that most know about, sometimes called the "great four:" paper, moveable-type, the compass, and gunpowder, but there were dozens more. It would have been hard to fill 17 fat volumes otherwise, even if 4 volumes were given over to alchemy and 300 pages of the ceramics edition to kilns.

As someone most comfortable with science when it is written down, I have enormous respect for anyone who can construct or invent anything, and admit to still being in awe of Velcro. So, far be it from me to dismiss Science and Civilisation in China (I couldn't anyway; I haven't read it) or China's contribution to science. It seems obvious that a civilization as old and self-contained as China's would have had all kinds of thinkers: artisans, inventors, craftsmen, contractors, and so on. It wouldn't have been a civilization without them. However, it occurs to me that Needham was overreaching.

Needham became obsessed with what his biographer calls "the Needham question:" 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 blosoming in the West? Needham deduced that the Chinese simply grew smug and complacent and that they forgot about their inventions, conveniently, some might say, just as Westerners began turning up on Chinese soil.

Certainly, it's impossible that an entire civilization could simply erase from memory and cease producing hundreds of its own innovations. What is more likely is that Chinese inventions remained very local, or at least were never mass produced or widely disseminated. It's also likely that sketches of inventions Needham found were just those - sketches. I used to sketch some wicked spaceships when I was a kid. They had lasers, and even eyeballs and tentacles. Not sure if anyone who found them in 2525 would attribute them to historical Maritime Canadian ingenuity, though.

And this brings us to the question: is an invention valid if it's forgotten, never catches on, or doesn't get past the design phase?

The Diamond Sutra is a much more lustrous (and concrete) example of China's lost inventions. A copy of the digest was discovered in a cave in Dunhuang in the early twentieth century and is considered by the British Library to be the "the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book," having been bound in the eighth century. That's certainly interesting, but there is no indication that printed books were in ample circulation in the centuries after that one was assembled. It was, like the "measuring instruments," discovered in a cave.

Open a book in a bookstore in China these days and you will think you are standing in the middle of a freshly painted room. They reek of chemicals and tend to be poorly put together. Content is screened by the Party and the selection is dire. Go into a bookstore in the West and see how many books you can find printed by Chinese publishing companies. Besides one or two from Hong Kong, my guess is that you couldn't find any.

In light of the present technology era, Chinese inventions seem, well, trivial. In 1978, Joseph Needham, after having had a US travel ban lifted, gave a speech in the city of Chicago. His Science and Civilisation in China had been lauded by academics worldwide, so many were eager to hear him speak. His topic? Gunpowder. The country in which he was lecturing was three years into its Viking program (sending probes to Mars) whereas Needham was talking up an accidental discovery that came about during a quest for an elixir for immortality in the ninth century.

I cannot recall being so enthralled by a book while being so put off by its subject. It's true China invented many things never properly documented or given their due in the West, but Needham has fallen into history as most Sinophiles do: as a determined embellisher. Needham may have been a scientific genius, but he was also a fool. He was used by the Communist Party in a ruse to have the world believe the Americans had used germ warfare against China (and North Korea) during the Korean War, a bogus charge China maintains.

It's hard to tell just what Simon Winchester thinks of Joseph Needham. He seems to admire him, or at least his intellect, but also seems to be aware of his excesses and overreaching. Needham certainly cut an interesting figure; he was an eccentric, and clearly Winchester chose to write about him because of that and because of all the interest lately in China. The book is not nearly critical enough of Needham, but it's a darned interesting read because Simon Winchester is a very good writer. He's so good, in fact, that I've since picked up his Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles, and hope to read others.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

I find the writer good but Needham does not seem quite worthy of a popular biography on this scale - I started to get bored despite Winchester's valiant attempts to make something of it.

Simon Winchester is a wonderful storyteller and his bio of Joseph Needham brings to light an amazing man who followed his ideals and created a better world for all.