Free The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester Page A

Holorenshaw) on the history of a particular branch of English socialism, regularly giving morris dance performances, swimming naked, attending meetings of the Cambridge Communist Party, offering sermons from the pulpit at Thaxted Church, and living through the manifold complications of his peculiarly organized love life.
    It was perhaps merciful that late in the summer of 1939 Lu Gwei-djen left Cambridge for California, initially to attend the Sixth Pacific Science Congress. She then decided to stay on: she had an offer from Berkeley that she felt bound to accept—and Needham, in Cambridge, agreed, because he was eager to further his mistress’s career and because he came to America often enough. So the affair continued, at long distance, its ardor undiminished, with just the logistics making matters a little more trying.
    Through this whirlwind of activity Joseph Needham started to become famous—and famous, above all, in England during the early days of the war, for being one of China’s most vigorous champions. This fame was to become central to his future, largely because of a secret meeting in a house in North Oxford one foggy November evening in 1939, when a group of wise men decided that, if it was at all possible, Needham should go to China on a mission.
    The key figure in this endeavor was a young Chinese professor of philosophy, Luo Zhongshu, who was about to leave for China after a stint teaching at Oxford. He had held a professorship at a university in the city of Chengdu, and while he was at Oxford he received regular letters andtelegrams from his former colleagues there, telling him in unsparing detail just how bad the situation was for them at home.
    Japan, it turned out, was engaged in a full frontal assault on China’s entire education system. The Japanese military apparently had a deep-seated loathing for China’s intellectual community, and this disdain was now manifesting itself in acts of brutality aimed specifically at China’s universities. Colleges in the cities of Shanghai, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Guangzhou had been selected as early targets for bombings. Nankai University in Tianjin had been repeatedly bombed, and its ruins were set ablaze with kerosene. The main university in Beijing had been initially stripped by looters, and its academic buildings were converted into brothels, bars, and stables for the use of troops, while its deanery and sanitarium were made into hospitals and barracks for the Japanese defense forces based nearby.
    To people in England already steeled to the plight of China’s civilians—information about the “rape of Nanking” had leaked slowly and steadily out to the West, shocking all who heard it—the news of savagery being directed at China’s intellectuals was stunning. And when Luo began to make speeches to university audiences across England claiming that of the 100 colleges then operating in China, no fewer than fifty-two had been destroyed or badly damaged in the fighting, his listeners were shocked. Any tragedy that extended its reach into a country’s education system was seen as particularly dire. If China’s intellectual community was not to go into a terminal decline, then the West—and Britain in particular—had to help quickly.
    Professor Luo eventually took this message to a gathering where he thought that shock might be more readily converted into action. It was a meeting of senior wise men from Oxford and Cambridge who assembled on November 15, 1939, in Norham Gardens at the house of the famous religious scholar H. N. Spalding, who was then Oxford’s professor of eastern religion and ethics. Luo stood before the group and launched into what his listeners remembered as a vivid description of a new and tragic development: because of the Japanese attacks, entire Chinese universities were now having to take the hitherto unimagined step of fleeing, pell-mell, into the supposed safety of the Chinese