The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester

Author:Simon Winchester
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061795886
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-10-04T04:25:13+00:00

Joseph Needham would remain in China for eighteen months more. By the time he left he had visited 296 Chinese institutes, universities, and research establishments; he had arranged for the delivery of thousands of tons of equipment and chemical and scientific journals; he would read, endlessly and voraciously, the various thousands of documents which he had collected and which he felt certain would enhance his knowledge of China; and he spent much of his final months laying the foundations for a diplomatically privileged organization to support Chinese science—an organization that would continue to function without him long after he had left.

Despite now having Dophi with him he was rather lonely. He missed Gwei-djen sorely: he wrote loving notes to her in his diary, and there are moments of great poignancy that seem almost to have brought him to tears. He recorded a moment in western China when he came across an American forces’ post exchange, where he could buy shoes to replace his own—if he could pay in American cash. In his wallet he found one five-dollar bill, left over from his trip to New York to see Gwei-djen two years before. He was overwhelmed, he wrote, by a sudden, terrible wave of nostalgia. Needham wrote her a long letter, one she later said she treasured above all others. It remains as much as anything his testimonial to China:

Nothing could exceed the impact which your country and your people has had on me since I first came here. It has been a time of much confusion, but for that very reason I have been able to penetrate everywhere into the life of villages and towns (roughing it of course a great deal in the process); and bend my solitary steps into Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist temples, often deserted, able therefore to savour to the full the great beauty of the traditional architecture in its setting of age-old trees and forgotten gardens. And I have been free to experience the life in Chinese homes and market-places, and see at first hand the miseries of a society in collapse, awaiting the dawn which must come soon. And when I say “roughing it” this is no exaggeration. Sometimes I set up my camp bed in an empty temple, sometimes at the back of a cooperative workshop. Besides all the usual insect pests there are rats in plenty—they used to bump up and down all night on the canvas ceiling when I was lying in bed at Jialing House with a temperature of 104° from the Haffkine plague vaccine. But on the other hand, what gastronomic delights I have found, and often from stalls in village streets; things to eat that most conventional Westerners (and indeed some of my Embassy colleagues) would fear to enjoy. Nothing could ever make me forget doujiang with bing tung and you tiao taken in the open air on a spring morning at Ganxian in Jiangxi, or the you zha bing of Guangdong straight out of its boiling oil,

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