39 Needham’s known interest in the erotic tempted more than a few letter writers to make contact. One communication, in the spring of 1948, came from Mr P. Ye, who described himself as a ‘38-year-old virgin male’ from Fudan University in Shanghai. He was concerned that because of ‘sexual radiation’ his eyelids oscillated whenever he masturbated, as he did five times daily. He wrote a lengthy technical enquiry, but its arrival was delayed, mainly because he had addressed it to ‘Dr Joseph Needham, Cambridge University, London’.
40 A series of separate monographs also emerged from the overmatter. Among them were The Great Astronomical Clocks of Mediaeval China, published in 1960; The Pre-Natal History of the Steam-Engine in 1962; and, most commercially successful of all (not least because of its clever title), Celestial Lancets: A History of Acupuncture.
41 The deliciously eccentric British architect – always dressed in breeches and canary-yellow socks – who created, among other magical places, the Welsh fantasy village of Portmeirion, and advised Needham on building techniques.
42 So close were the men that Needham dedicated the first of the two volumes of Science and Civilisation in China devoted to military technology – Volume V, Part 6 – to Zhou, for his role as ‘a constant encourager of this project’.
43 Other research using live biological agents was also conducted in eight American cities between 1950 and 1966, according to testimony given before a Senate committee in 1976 – a disclosure that shocked most of America at the time and led to widespread popular revulsion against biological weapons generally, and a widespread reaffirmation of a decision by President Nixon in 1972 to ban the possession of such weapons by the United States.
44 Needham’s letters and other papers relating to the commission are preserved not in the Cambridge University archives but, in consideration of the sensitivity of the topic of germ warfare, in the rather more secure surroundings of London’s Imperial War Museum.
45 By chance my own copy of Joseph Needham’s book Science Outpost, which recounts his four wartime years in China, once belonged to Gene Weltfish. He had inscribed it, ‘Gene! With love from Joseph, Jan. 1949. Write me how you like it.’ Senator McCarthy and the regents of Columbia would doubtless have found its possession a useful piece of additional evidence for their crusade.
46 A strawberry-growing relative of Punnett’s invented the small wooden basket now known, shorn of its terminal t, as a punnet.
47 There is still much resistance to the use of the pinyin name Beijing for the current Chinese capital. Not only are very few outsiders able to pronounce the word accurately; its use also flies in the face of the more general use in English of ‘English’ names or pronunciations for distant cities or countries. Roma is called Rome, Deutschland is called Germany, Suomi is called Finland, and Zhongguo is called China. Many who accept this logic would like Peking returned to common currency, but doubt that it will ever happen.
48 The United States finally bowed to reality on this issue in 1971. Since then, Taiwan has been excluded from the UN, and it is regarded now as a part of the People’s Republic, which has the single Chinese seat in the General Assembly and on the Security Council.
49 Britain was not so rigid in its approach to China as America during the cold war. London had recognized the People’s Republic almost immediately after its inception, but had exchanged diplomats – junior officials sent as chargés d’affaires – only from 1954 onwards. This half-hearted approach, which nonetheless managed to survive the Korean War, finally evolved into the sending of a full ambassador in 1972.
50 Cort was told to leave, and, suspecting that he would be arrested if he returned to Senator McCarthy’s America, settled in Czechoslovakia instead.
51 The vastly admired Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) was begun in 1885 – under the editorship of Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell – and sought from its inception to include essays, some decidedly opinionated, on anyone of significance or notoriety in British life since Cassivellaunus, the chieftain who tried to oppose Caesar’s second invasion in 54 bc. The present edition, which runs to sixty volumes, includes 55,000 lives. Queen Victoria’s entry is the longest; among the many more obscure biographies is that of an eighteenth-century wrestling harpist, the Welshwoman Marged ferch Ifan.
52 He also kept a hookah, which he had bought at a Uighur market in Chinese Turkestan. Though the device lies today in the Caius archives it is not known if he ever smoked it, either privately in his room or, even less probably, among the other fellows in the relaxed cosiness of the senior combination room.
53 By now he had sold the magnificent Armstrong Siddeley and had replaced it with a rather more prosaic car, a Ford Cortina. But had Mao known he would have approved: Needham had ordered the vehicle painted jingtailan, a word now taken to mean cloisonné, but in fact meaning an exquisite Chinese shade of pale blue.
54 Played by Peter O’Toole in Bertolucci’s film masterpiece The Last Emperor (1987).
Simon Winchester, Bomb, Book & Compass: Joseph Needham & the Great Secrets of China
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