The first expedition he undertook, beginning in August 1943, was the gem. This was by far the most complex and the most difficult – and, as it turned out, the most instructive and rewarding. Though many setbacks and minor disasters caused it to run months beyond schedule, it took him to the furthest northwestern reaches of China, far beyond the western terminus of the Great Wall and out into the hot and sandy deserts of what now is called either Sinkiang or Xinjiang but during the war was called, much more romantically, Chinese Turkestan.
On this journey he headed to one specific spot in the Turkestan desert where there was a very small cave. Western scholars have given it a number, 17, and it is one of the 400 man-made Mogao Grottoes that line a cliff outside an oasis beside the far western desert town of Dunhuang, which is otherwise known as a rest stop on the Silk Road, with restaurants that offer steaks cut from local donkeys.
For Needham, the importance of Cave 17 had nothing to do with his official duties. This cavern, whose doorway is so low that one must stoop to enter it, was the place where, thirty-six years earlier, in 1907, an immense and ancient Chinese library had been discovered, including a printed scroll that was now recognized as the oldest dated printed book in history. It is known as the Diamond Sutra, and it had been printed in AD 868.
Map of Needham’s Northwestern Expedition, Chongqing-Dunhuang.
That this book was made by a Chinese man demonstrated conclusively that printers had been at work in China six centuries before either Gutenberg or Caxton set their own first books in type in Europe. If any one thing in all creation gave the lie to the western notion that China was a backward country, this was it. The fragile document that had been plucked from the sands of Cave 17 showed that China was, quite incontrovertibly, a nation at the forefront of human civilization. From the moment Needham first read the story of the Diamond Sutra, he felt an irresistible pull: he had to get from Chongqing to the caves at Dunhuang, no matter what.
He decided early on that his expeditions – certainly this first one, which he knew from the maps would be long and would cover difficult terrain – should be made in a rugged, reliable, go-anywhere kind of vehicle. After spending some days kicking tyres, he chose a sludge-brown two-and-a-half-ton Chevrolet truck, a converted canvas-covered American ambulance that had been lent somewhat grudgingly by the Royal Air Force truck pool. He then hired to go with it a Cantonese driver, Guang Wei, whom he liked, and who agreed to double as a mechanic.
On Needham’s instructions – given in English, since this was to be the common tongue among the participants, who came from London, Guangzhou, and Malacca, and so had three different linguistic origins – Guang painted ‘Sino-British Science Cooperation Office’ in large white letters, as well as in Chinese calligraphy, on both of the truck’s cab doors and on both sides of its body. In addition he mounted two small flagpoles beside the headlights: one flying the Union Jack of Britain, the other the blue-quartered red flag, a white sun in its quarter, of Nationalist China. (Despite his friendship with the Chinese Communists in Chongqing, Needham felt it would be imprudent to fly any hammers, sickles, or red stars. This was an official British diplomatic adventure, and as a diplomat he was officially accredited to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government.) The flags would alleviate any possible doubt by friend or foe as to exactly who was travelling – and since stray parties of Japanese soldiers or strafing fighter planes had the habit of turning up in the most unexpected places, foes might well be encountered. Being able to demonstrate the mission’s innocently scientific purpose could, Needham thought, turn out to be a matter of life or death.
The team then packed the truck, first with the goods they were to deliver, and then with their own supplies – forty-gallon drums of fuel,20 all the imaginable tools and spare parts they might need, camp beds, Primus stoves, the apparently purposeless lengths of string and oilcloth and sheets of tin without which no self-respecting Englishman would travel anywhere remote, and a very great deal of tinned food – meats by Hormel and Fray Bentos, biscuits by Huntley & Palmer, mustard by Colman’s or Keen’s, as well as bottles of the undrinkable Paterson’s Camp coffee, the rather better Fry’s cocoa, and Cadbury’s chocolate bars, seemingly by the ton.
They needed only to acquire the necessary permits: authorization notes had to be obtained from nine different organizations – the Foreign Office, the Transport Bureau, the army garrison headquarters, and other arms of China’s bureaucracy. Also, dozens of photographs had to be signed and countersigned in police stations and visa offices – a process that took the exasperated Needham several days. But eventually, at the end of the first week of August – armed with a bundle of chop-covered, seal-emblazoned, signed and sworn and notarized and diplomatically rendered official documents – they were ready to go.
They left Chongqing in what initially would be a two-truck convoy. Needham was in his own vehicle, with H. T. Huang and three other passengers: an American geologist, Ed Beltz, who was cadging a ride; the writer and teacher Robert Payne, who also needed a short lift to see a dying friend in Chengdu; and a young Chinese woman, Liao Hongying, a chemist educated at Oxford’s Somerville College, who would act as Needham’s amanuensis and provide him – though almost certainly platonically – with the female company he craved. She was extremely beautiful, as well as intellectually accomplished, and there had been much nudging and winking within the mission when the roguish counsellor had first selected her. (Considering what eventually befell Miss Liao, as we shall see, the whisperings at the embassy turned out to be most ironically misdirected.)
In another embassy Chevrolet truck would be Sir Eric Teichman, who was being driven to a northern Chinese border city so that he could head west on another epic overland journey towards India, from where he would eventually fly home to Britain. The departure date for the two vehicles was set for 7 August, a Saturday. It was expected that on this, their first Chinese adventure, the party would be staying away from base for eight weeks or so, little more.
The converted Chevrolet ambulance in which Needham travelled to northwest China, pictured during a repair stop on the Silk Road.
For the duration of their expedition the Dunhuang caves were at the front of their minds: reaching them was the ultimate goal, no matter what the hardships. But there were other things to see on the way – other Chinese marvels. The first of these, which Needham managed to visit just a week after he left Chongqing, involved a subject that has captivated China since the beginnings of its history: water.
China is, basically, a gigantic plateau, tilted gently from west to east. The biggest of the Chinese rivers, the catchment of nearly all others, flow almost entirely in that general direction, from their sources in the Himalayas in the west to their estuaries on the eastern ocean. The rivers swell each springtime as a result of the melting snows and soon afterwards become swollen again with rains during the southern monsoon. As a result, questions related to flooding and water control became, almost from the nation’s beginnings, a matter of overarching importance.
And this was not just local importance. The Chinese had long ago realized that, so far as flooding was concerned, local interests had to be subordinated to a wider national need. Swollen rivers did their damage or brought their benefits to huge tracts of land and to large numbers of people who, if they were prudent, and whatever their local loyalties, ought to come together to bring each river under control. So the creation of what one might call a supra-local national water authority, and a large bureaucracy to populate it, became of great importance early on in China’s history.
As it happened, the immense power that such a body eventually acquired in early China helped to strengthen the fledgling imperial system as a whole – and it quickly became evident that whoever controlled the empire’s rivers simultaneously wielded enormous power over the empire. Some sinologists go further: the historically despotic nature of Chinese imperial rulers derived from one abiding reality – that the keepers of China’s hydraulics had the wherewithal
to do with China much as they pleased.
Water engineers were given formidable powers, and when they were successful, they earned formidable reputations. One of these engineers, in the Qin dynasty, was Li Bing, who created a monster irrigation project on the Min River 2,300 years ago: astonishingly, it still stands. Part of Needham’s plan when he set out that August was to inspect this structure: it was to be his introduction to the fact that ancient China could not only do small things very well – such as grafting plums and inventing the abacus and the magnetic compass – but also make achievements on a gargantuan scale.
Getting to the dam site turned out to be agonizingly slow. The men and Miss Liao travelled through the heat and dust of the Red Basin as slowly as sloths. Within the first moments of leaving Chongqing, they had been presented with a sight that unsettled their Chinese drivers. A funeral cortège passed directly in front of Sir Eric Teichman’s truck. It turned out that the chairman of the Chinese Republic, Lin Sen, had died the previous week, and while climbing a hill on the way out of town the little convoy was forced to stop and wait for an hour as the white-robed mourners edged by. Teichman’s driver complained that this was an omen: so sombre a delay must mean that his journey – maybe everyone’s journey – was ill fated.
The village of Yongqiang, which now is just a ten-minute drive west of Chongqing, took Needham and his trucks more than eight hours to reach. By the time the sun was setting on Saturday evening his little convoy had bumped and strained over only sixty miles, reaching the town of Neijiang. They stayed that night at the China Travel Service inn, which
in contrast to the old-fashioned Chinese inns is very clean (and there is no insect life to be found in their comfortable modern beds). In the old inns the beds consist of just a few bare planks and the traveller is expected to bring his own bedding. Modern sanitation has of course never been heard of. In the old northern regions the beds, called kang in Chinese, are platforms made of clay which stand about two feet from the floor. A fire is supposed to burn underneath all night but invariably expires about 3 or 4 a.m. leaving one to freeze until dawn. The primitive central heating device can be temperamental in other ways; I have known it catch fire on occasion, and destroy the clothes of one of my Chinese colleagues.
Whether his own clothes caught fire or his truck broke down – it was already leaking oil, and the radiator was dripping – we do not know, but Needham made no progress on Sunday. He opted instead to meet and have dinner with a Chinese cavalry colonel whose card he had been given, who turned out to have been educated at Saumur, and who spoke impeccable French. On Monday morning Needham went on a side trip to buy fuel – ninety gallons of power alcohol and an additional ten gallons of absolute alcohol, which he planned to cut with some low-octane petrol he had bought in Chongqing. He irritatedly described the road towards the distant blue mountains as ‘rough going’,21 though he was charmed to find someone selling sugar plums. He also bought apples and a basket of tomatoes, then managed to avoid the normally compulsory police check on the main northbound road, arriving in Chengdu just before suppertime, just in time to allow his mechanic to rush the flagging truck to a repair shop.
Then finally the blue range of mountains stood ahead, rising abruptly before them, with the Min River coursing out of a chasm with terrific speed. Needham knew the most important statistics – that the Min fell 12,000 feet from its headwaters in only 400 miles, so that it flowed down an average gradient of thirty feet every mile, which in riverine terms is a formula for exceptional danger. He knew also that in 250 BC the redoubtable Li Bing had worked to tame and harness the Min, creating the structure that stood before him now, which visitors before and since have felt should be listed as one of the wonders of the world.
The site is called Dujiangyan. As an irrigation project, it may not seem to deserve being ranked alongside the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal, but it is actually one of mankind’s more extraordinary achievements. Needham liked to quote, approvingly, the ancient Roman engineer Sextus Julius Frontinus, who wrote famously in the first century after Christ that his aqueducts were indispensable, and would be remembered long after ‘the idle pyramids, or the useless, though famous, works of the Greeks’.
Needham liked this quotation not simply because Frontinus was right about the Egyptians and the Greeks but also because his achievements in Rome had been made three full centuries after those of Li Bing in China. Moreover, unlike the highfalutin monuments beside the Nile and the Yamuna, Dujiangyan had been made purely for the common good, and it still works today just as it was designed to work, whereas many Roman aqueducts lie in ruins. The fact that Dujiangyan was still working excited Needham most.
In 250 BC Li Bing had been appointed governor of the province of Shu – modern-day Sichuan – under the kingdom of Qin, during the unstable period of the so-called Warring States, and shortly before the formation of the unified Qin dynasty, from which the name China is derived. Like everyone, he was only too well aware of the Min’s deadly caprices. It was a river that either ran half-dry in the summer, leaving the paddy farmers of the plains starved for water, or else, more commonly, flooded uncontrollably and caused a swath of destruction and death all the way to Chengdu and beyond. The river needed to be brought to heel. Li Bing, after winning permission from the king of Qin, undertook what would in time be described as ‘the largest and most carefully planned public works project yet seen anywhere in the eastern half of the Eurasian continent’.
To control the river, he decided to cut a new spillway and channel any excess water through it with a specially designed, adjustable diversion dam. It took him seven years to break through the mountain: he managed this by having workers burn piles of hay on the surface of rocks to make them hot, and then pour cold water to cool them down rapidly, letting the nearly instant contraction crack them open. This cutting eventually led to an opening seventy feet wide, and the Min River waters, which were shifted towards it by Li Bing’s clever fish-shaped dam, began to course through it the moment the final wall was broken open. The anniversary is still celebrated each year: a ceremony called the ‘breaking of the waters’ is held every summer, commemorating an eastern engineering feat that was undertaken more than 2,000 years ago, when westerners (though not Plato, Aristotle, the Egyptians, or the Mesopotamians) still coated themselves with woad and did little more than grunt.
Needham was fascinated by what he found at Dujiangyan. The engineering achievement was astonishing, its design was aesthetically pleasing, and its long endurance was remarkable. He also loved the architecture of the temples that had been built on the hillsides centuries ago to commemorate Li Bing’s work. He spent several pleasant hours gazing down at the river from a cool vantage point high on one of the pagodas in the forest.
Then he met the modern director of the irrigation scheme, who was technically Li Bing’s successor. He encountered him walking around in the wet mist beside the main spillway, checking monitoring devices and reading water meters. He had a slide rule sticking out of his pocket and turned out to have been trained in Manchester. Needham said how impressed he was by the system – the spillway, the dams, the endless torrents of water – and all of it created so long ago. No wonder, he said, that they had erected a temple to Li Bing. ‘ To us,’ replied the director, smiling, ‘he was like a god. He surely deserved a temple.’
Needham now turned north. His plan was to cross an outlier of the mountain range and head northwest to join the Silk Road – a route that could take him, in theory, all the way to Baghdad and to the Mediterranean at Antioch. Even this fairly modest leg of the journey turned out to be wretchedly difficult. His diary pages for the second and third weeks of August are filled with references to breakdowns, interminable waits, and unexpected disasters – interspersed, however, with a jocular perspicacity, as if despite the frustration he finds it all rather amusing and instructive:
At 2.30 p.m. the alcohol gave out… changed the carburettor tops… took off feed pump, put grease between the leaves of the
diaphragm… Found 40 trucks waiting for the ferry so we put up in a little inn, open air. There was a storm alarm, and also a lunar rainbow… Sir Eric in trouble with the gendarmerie for photographing a bridge. We are informed that the road is blocked and that we must wait. The hotel at Hanzhong was full, so off we went to the China Inland Mission22 and all of us were put up. Had an enjoyable visit to Bishop Civelli and his merry men.
Needham’s enjoyment stemmed from his discovery that the bishop was Roman Catholic and conducted High Mass each Sunday, in Latin. Needham and H. T. went along, Needham finding himself open-mouthed with delight – at seeing the entirely Chinese congregation lip-syncing the Latin recitatives, and most of all at listening to sacred music he had last heard in his little church in Thaxted. He said he felt transported, back to medieval Europe, and back to Essex in the 1930s.
But Needham’s greatest annoyance was the growing frequency of not being transported. At times his litany of woes – as when he tried to cross the Bao River, ten days out from Chongqing – would become a full-blown chorus:
Arrived at [the ferry stop in] Wuguanhe at 10 a.m. Awful big washout. Lines of trucks and endless mulecarts there all day. Hopeless organisation. An incident officer should have been appointed with full charges for as far as the traffic jam extends on each side. Here again, like the rotten bridges on the Sichuan side [they had crossed into the province of Shaanxi, notorious for its inefficiency], surely far more men, money and effort ought to be spent on this great national northwest artery.