Read Online The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester - Free Book Online

strokes; those in the largest group are composed of only four—are designed to show the roots of various Chinese concepts, and they are placed usually to the left of (or less frequently above, below, or to the right of) other characters, so that the combined package makes up the intended, totally new word.
    Usually a Chinese dictionary arranges these radicals in order of their complexity—listing those made with one stroke first; followed by those with two strokes; then by those with three, four, five, and so on. Needham realized that with his nearly infallible photographic memory he would be better served by a dictionary that arranged the radicals by the direction and shape of the strokes—putting all radicals that had vertical strokes on one page, all those with strokes that veer to the left on another, and so on. This was a highly eccentric way to do it—and no Chinese lexicographer or textbook author has seen fit to copy Needham’s model—but it evidently worked for him.

    This was the Joseph Needham—bespectacled, tousle-haired, scientifically obsessed—who so enchanted Lu Gwei-djen when they met in Cambridge in the late summer of 1937.
    He plowed on like this throughout the spring and summer of 1938—laboring during the daytime at his biochemistry, teaching with his usual eager flamboyance, continuing to present well-received papers to the technical journals, and then, once all his official university duties were discharged, reverting to his newfound intellectual passion. Late into each night he could be seen poring over his dictionary, a pool of light the only illumination in his room, a furiously scratching pencil the only sound, strands of blue cigarette smoke coiling up into the darkness.
    By the time autumn had settled on the city, Lu Gwei-djen realized that her lover was well on the way to being fluent and usefully literate. It was a formidable achievement, and the two of them were vastly proud of it. Even Dorothy Needham was sufficiently impressed to offer congratulations, though she spent most of that year and the next sunk deep in her own studies, tactfully keeping out of the way, and pretending not to mind.
    But when one is thirty-eight years old, the linguistic corners of the brain are notoriously difficult to penetrate—and at a certain level, in trying to make the leap from simple competence in Chinese to the excellence he demanded, Needham ran into difficulties. He could absorb only so much. Confusion started to trouble him.
    Lu Gwei-djen was there in the front line, of course, as helpful as she could be. Soon, however, he decided to bring over to his side some heavy artillery: Gustav Haloun, a young Czech who had been recently appointed professor of Chinese at Cambridge, agreed to give him more formal help, and through 1938 and 1939 the two devised an elaborate dual system for helping Needham learn the deep complexities of the language.
    Haloun, who readily recognized his student’s seriousness, decided first to get Needham to help translate an entire Chinese text. It was an obscure fifth-century treatise on philosophy, the Guan Zi ; and the task, which took Haloun and Needham four or five hours each week, and which from Haloun’s point of view represented a triumph of enlightened self-interest, utterly absorbed Needham: he later said he found the hours poring over the Chinese text and turning its hundreds of ideographs into elegant English prose a time of serene intellectual bliss. Studying Chinese, he once wrote, was “a liberation, like going for a swim on a hot day, for it got you entirely out of the prison of alphabetical words, and into the glittering crystalline world of ideographic characters.”
    He positively adored learning to write the language; and though he tried hard to speak it as well, the written language most engaged him. He understood its particular value in China, and he amply appreciated the notion that a sophisticated and elegant