In some ways, Joseph Needham (1900-95) lived up quite charmingly to old myths about absent-minded professors: staggeringly learned, but often shabby, covered in egg stains and hopelessly abstracted from quotidian realities. He attracted all manner of academic tall tales, the oddest of which usually turned out to be true. Take the time when a Russian scientist dropped by for tea in Needham’s Cambridge rooms, and asked, in passing, if the Cantabrigian sage happened to know who had translated one of his own works into English. Needham mused a while, thinking that the title sounded familiar; rummaged in his stacked bookshelves; then pulled out the volume in question and glanced through it. Ah yes, he muttered, no wonder it rang a bell: he himself had been the anonymous translator, back in his undergraduate days. He modestly conceded that he was no longer entirely fluent in Russian. His German, Greek, French and Italian, however, were still impeccable.

As, more importantly, was his Chinese. Though he was well into middle age before he so much as glanced at an ideogram — the first Mandarin word he learnt meant “cigarette” — Needham eventually became the mastermind behind and principal author of a multi-volume work, still in progress, which has been called “perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by a single man”. The work in question is Science and Civilisation in China; the first part appeared in 1954 and 23 further volumes have been published since then. It is a peerless masterpiece. Compared to Needham, Gibbon was a short-winded, unambitious idler.

So it is pleasing to recall that, unlike some prophets, Needham was properly honoured in his own country. (China also treated him with great respect. He was known there by several Mandarin names, most commonly Li You-Se, which literally means “Arrangement-Zither Plum”, but sounds suitably dignified.) Early reviewers were awed and thrilled, and fell over themselves trying to find adequate superlatives. By the time of his death in the mid-1990s, Needham was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Companion of Honour. As was noted at the time, you can count people with that trio of laurels on one finger of one hand. His obituaries said that he had the most copious learning of any European thinker since Erasmus; another even suggested that he belonged in the company of Aristotle. Not bad going for a doctor’s son from Clapham.

The American title of Simon Winchester’s admirably readable biography is The Man Who Loved China. This probably sounded a bit touchy-feely for the land of the Stiff Upper Lip, but it is a much clearer indication of the book’s contents than Bomb, Book & Compass, which falsely implies lots of Boy’s Own stuff about gadgets. The British subtitle, Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China, is similarly catchpenny. Needham was not in the business of uncovering things that had been deliberately hidden, but of reclaiming things that had been neglected: they were “secrets” only in the sense that, say, French irregular verbs are a secret to daydreaming schoolchildren. Almost by accident at first, and then with mounting wonder, Needham recognised and gave substance to a truth that the West had been too arrogant to investigate and China too arrogant to advertise: for hundreds of years, the Middle Kingdom had led the world in both science and technology.

Thanks in large part to an extended diplomatic mission to China during the second world war, Needham was able to find incontrovertible evidence of achievement after achievement. The printing press: 7th-century AD (sorry, Herr Gutenberg). The magnetic needle compass: AD1088. Gunpowder: 12th-century AD. The Chinese also thrashed the West in developing everything from the Zoetrope to perfumed lavatory paper. An astonishing story; and still more astonishing is that it all seems to have come to a thunderous halt in the 15th century, when Europe crept up from behind and then swiftly overtook the East. Why is this? There are no easy answers, but the question itself is now called the Needham question.

The earliest Times Literary Supplement review of Needham’s magnum opus stated that “the important thing about this work . . . is that it is very exciting”. This is also true of Winchester’s biography, which supplies the human side of the genius in generous detail: his keen eye for the ladies, his trencherman’s appetite, his scruffiness, his chain-smoking (he learnt that fateful Mandarin word while enjoying a post-coital gasper with his Chinese mistress), his enthusiasm for Morris dancing — he helped pioneer the early 20th-century revival of the curious hobby — and the political naivety that led him to support Mao long after the Great Helmsman’s fiendishness was apparent to much smaller minds. This low point in his career may also be seen as a testimony to his profound affection for China and his still deeper faith in the integrity of all scientists: when his eastern colleagues told him that the Americans had used biological weapons in Korea, he simply could not credit that they might have been forced to lie.

But while Winchester’s breezy narrative abounds in human detail, it tends to want depth. Although a notable improvement on its main precursor, a terse Unesco publication by Maurice Goldsmith, it is still too short to be more than an entertaining primer. Winchester whizzes through the first 37 years of Needham’s life (the time of his triumphs in embryology) in about as many pages, and leaves some facets of his complex personality (his enduring Christian faith, for one) largely unexplored. The definitive biography — and he surely deserves one — will probably have to be written by a multi-disciplinary, multinational team of western and Chinese scientists and historians. Meanwhile, as China grows ever more powerful, Needham’s monumental attempt at bridge-building will become more invaluable by the year.

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