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

eager member of the political left and so was very much in step with her own political ideals. Moreover, the vast range of his interests suggested that he was something of a Renaissance man, and she knew that the press had suggested he might be regarded as a latter-day Erasmus.
    She had read of his interest in the Spanish civil war, an event that had especially captured the imagination of many of the young and more radical Chinese. She herself had wanted to contribute her mite to the Cornford-McLaurin Fund. The thought that these two promising young men had braved so much, and then had lost their lives to a cause that was so clearly good, was to her intensely romantic; and those who supported the fund—as she knew Joseph Needham had—must, she felt, be thoroughly admirable.

    Lu Gwei-djen, the brilliant young biochemist from Nanjing, in a formal portrait taken in 1937 shortly before she left China for Cambridge, and a life as Needham’s mistress and muse.
    Her plan was to pursue a field of biochemical research that was then virtually unknown in China, so impoverished and troubled were the country’s universities. Though a number of other universities around the world, particularly those in America, offered her places and opportunities, she wanted most of all to come to England. Her keenest ambition was to work at Sir Frederick Hopkins’s now world-renowned Biochemistry Institute,and perhaps while there to make contact with these two scientists who had become her faraway heroes.
    The merit of her own work was all too evident, and on seeing her résumé Hopkins accepted her application in a flash. Dorothy Needham, to whom the professor had then passed her letter, agreed readily to help her as an adviser, and perhaps even to become her academic supervisor.
    Lu Gwei-djen had been born on July 22, 1904, into a highly regarded Christian family. The first character of her given name,, was chosen to signify the sweet-smelling osmanthus tree that blooms in eastern China in July, the month of her birth; and the second,, signifies treasure, a thing of great value. As an infant she was plump, active, and widely adored—but her life got off to a shaky start, thanks to the civil wars raging across eastern China, and her family was forced to evacuate to Shanghai to get away from the battles being fought around Nanjing. She did not begin her formal education until she was nine, when the situation calmed down enough for her to come home.
    She had started out as a rebellious and archly nationalistic child—as a teenager she had insisted to her friends that she would never learn English, and that those Chinese who did so were no better than “traitors and fools.” But then in 1922 she won a coveted place at a newly built American-run college that would soon be famous—Nanjing’s Ginling College for Girls, the “little sister in the Orient” of Smith College in Massachusetts.
    Under the soothing ministrations of this liberal American education, Lu Gwei-djen began to mellow. Within no more than a few months her early anger had all dissipated. She swiftly became fascinated by English, and within a year was fluent in it. She took up the piano with gusto. She studied—“with an intense desire,” she recounted later—though her early choices of mathematics, religion, English, and hygiene slowly gave way to an all-science curriculum. She began this with the study of zoology and botany, before finally developing a keen interest in biochemistry and in particular the study of the mechanics of animal muscles.
    She boarded a steamer at Shanghai in the early summer of 1937. Two other young scientists accompanied her—Shen Shizhang, who after studying with Needham went on to become a professor of zoology at Yale; and Wang Yinglai, who won fame by being the first to create synthetic insulin.The crossing from the Yangzi to the Thames took two months; their ship docked in London in late