The Enerplus Honor, Pride, Grace, and Courage wells have been updated.
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China
The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom, Simon Winchester, c. 2008.
Joseph Needham
During his travels, the Wade-Giles system of transliteration was in widespread use in China (Peking, Mao Tse-tung, and Chungking); now replaced by the pinyin system (Beijing, Mao Zedong, Chongqing.
Prologue: begins March 21, 1943.
Page 6, after Needham arrives in Chongqing after an exhausting journey halfway around the world; he needed sleep. Planning for his visit to the British embassy.
But that could all wait for the next day. Right now he wanted simply to bathe, unpack, eat dinner alone, and sleep. Most important, he wanted to write a letter to the woman, now living in New York City, who was the main reason he had come here.
She was named Lu Gwei-djen, and she was Chinese, born thirty-nine years before in the city of Nanjing, and a scientist like himself. They had met in Cambridge six years earlier, when she was thirty-three and he was thirty-seven and a married man. They had fallen in love, and Dorothy Needham, to whom Joseph at the time been married for more than ten years, decided to accept the affair in a spirit of intellectually tolerant and fashionably left-wing complaisance.
1911: the Chinese empire had fallen
1937: the Japanese invaded
by 1943, the Japanese occupied one-third of the country
Almost overnight and almost single-handedly, Joseph Needham changed the west's opinion of China.
He would write a book so immense in scale and so magisterial in authority that it stands alongside the greatest of the world's great encyclopedias and dictionaries as a monument to the power of human understanding:
- published in 1954
- 18 volumes by the time Needham died in 1995
- now stands at 24 volumes
- Science and Civilisation in China
- universally acknowledged to be the greatest work of explanation of the Middle Kingdom that has yet been created in western history
Written by the man
- who, since he was also a nudist, a wild dancer, an accordion player, and a chain-smoking churchgoer
- seen by some as decidedly odd
had first arrived a Chongqing airport the battered American warplane in the spring of 1943
Chapter One: The Barbarian and the Celestial
To be continued elsewhere. Except for the coda, p. 246:
There was an unanticipated coda to this story. In the early autumn of 1989, Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen married.
The woman from Nanjing, who had been named for the sweet-smelling osmanthus tree and as a thing of great value, had first met Joseph Needham in 1937 (in Cambridge, England) and had fallen under his spell in 1938. He had been thirty-seven years old; she thirty-three. They had become lovers, and ever since had been inseparable boon companions. Now, after fully fifty-one years of waiting in the wings, during which her essential presence in Joseph's life was wholly accepted by Dorothy, Gwei-djen was at last to marry the man with whom she had shared this undying passion.
She died two years later.
It puts a lot of things in perspective.
