BIOGRAPHY:Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China By Simon Winchester Viking, 317pp. £20 AFTER THEY made love, he lit a cigarette. He was married, a Cambridge don with a dazzling reputation in biochemistry; she was his graduate student, recently arrived from China. He turned to her, waving the cigarette: "How do you write this in Chinese?" Rising, she wrote out the character for "fragrant smoke".
From that moment, Joseph Needham plunged headlong; his passion for his student, Lu Gwei-djen, gradually enlarging to envelop all of China: its language, its history, its culture, but, above all else its stupendous achievements in technology and science. Its monument was to become a stunning series of books - the (so far) 24 volumes documenting the results of his pioneering work, and, in so doing, revealing for the first time to the West the full extent of Science and Civilisation in China.
If loving China was not fashionable then, it is certainly less so now. In fact, this book's original title - The Man Who Loved China- was changed to the present one, perhaps designed to appeal to the gadget-obsessed West. But "love" is probably the only word adequate to the obsession that overwhelmed Joseph Needham that evening.
Like his commitment to Lu Gwei-djen, it was to endure until the end. Without its driving force, he would hardly have lasted the first months in Chongqing, where he was dispatched by the British government in 1943 to establish contact with Chinese scientists whose universities had been decimated by the Japanese. But from the day he landed, Needham was caught up in another mission. It began when, with the fervour of infatuation, he found himself comparing the "strangely familiar" city in which he landed to an English fens village. As a habit of mind, this, arguably, enabled all other comparisons to follow. In his first hours, watching a local gardener grafting a fruit tree, he noted how radically it differed from his father's own method - and was probably, he surmised, a thousand years more ancient.
From that moment, Needham was possessed by a new passion: to seek out Chinese science in all its varied aspects: theoretical, technical, applied. With the voraciousness of a lover, he grasped at every detail, seizing every chance to find out more. His father's motto - "No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised" - stood him in good stead. The fact that he was a well-regarded scientist with diplomatic status kept him largely free from political entanglements. His discipline also gave system to his questions and detailed note-taking.
IN OTHER WAYS Needham was fortunate. He had already freed himself sufficiently from Western conventions to open his mind to a very different way of life. Even in Cambridge, eyebrows had been raised at his ménage à trois(tolerated, maybe even welcomed, by his wife), his championing of socialist causes, his crazy enthusiasms such as Morris dancing and nudism.
Apart from excellent mandarin, learned initially from his lover, Needham possessed inexhaustible energy, a talent for survival and for finding the right friends. His foraging seemed to bring daily confirmation of the priority of Chinese scientific and technological achievements. Printing? Invented at least six centuries before either Gutenberg or Caxton. Gunpowder? At least two and perhaps three centuries before the West. The maritime compass? A full century before the West.
A list of these discoveries (helpfully summarised in an Appendix) includes everything from distilling alcohol to the wheelbarrow. That the West knew nothing of these inventions did not surprise him; but as it turns out, neither did his Chinese contemporaries.
Thus for both worlds, Needham emerges as a key figure, his work provoking in the West a drastic revaluation of the world's oldest enduring civilization - and for the Chinese, a new source of national pride.
In that new China, Needham was gradually displaced. Like many sinologists, he had difficulty in separating out good from bad, and so came to criticise Mao only after his death. Yet his discoveries survive the politics: now widely acknowledged in China, Needham's work still remains little known to the West. So it is to Simon Winchester's great credit that he has chosen this story, and he tells it well. Already well acquainted with China, Winchester also understands that an adventure is not merely a matter of love affairs, hair-breadth escapes, hardship, notoriety, and eventual fame. For Needham was, above all, an adventurer in ideas, willing to take great risks by investigating, on an epic scale, the Chinese origins of just about everything.
Driven by insatiable curiosity, Needham was, first of all, a man of many questions. One dominated all others, becoming known in time as "the Needham question": Why did science as we know it not develop in China?Particularly when, in the previous 14 centuries, China had been more successful than Europe in acquiring knowledge of natural phenomena and turning it to human benefit? At some point around 1500, as he saw it, the two civilizations diverged: the West developing what we know as modern science; China apparently mired in increasing intellectual isolation - and immobility.
Of course what Needham discovered in China was simply a different category of science: a myriad of inventions and technologies, produced at a greater rate than any known Western civilization, including the Greeks. In the end, one must conclude that only Western arrogance could dictate such a question - an arrogance Needham's own work would come to expose.
Today Needham would have been among the first to acknowledge that China may soon surpass us at even our own brand of science. One only has to meditate on the affinities of qi(the shifting energy systems which define all-under-heaven) with present-day quantum physics to see that Chinese assumptions better prepare them to enter that world than our own thing-oriented, bifurcated thinking, which is still, at least in the popular mind, stuck in Newtonian physics.
In years to come, perhaps the question will be another one: why, despite the astounding life-work of Joseph Needham, is it still taking the West so long to wake up to what will prove, once again, to be the central - and crucial - importance of China?
• Jerusha McCormack is visiting professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she helped found the first Irish Studies Centre in China. Her latest book, co-authored with John Blair and designed for Chinese graduate students, is entitled Western Civilization with Chinese Comparisons(Fudan University Press, 2006)