In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling
author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"--New
York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing
page-turner"--Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph
Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely
held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced
country.
No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking
intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of
folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge
University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student,
with whom he began a lifelong affair.
He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded
the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he
embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest
frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to
bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of
mankind's most familiar innovations--including printing, the compass,
explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper--often centuries
before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys,
vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war-torn China to
far-flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese
people.
After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had
discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in
China, describing the country's long and astonishing history of
invention and technology. By the time he died, he had produced,
essentially single-handedly, seventeen immense volumes, marking him as
the greatest one-man encyclopedist ever.
Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping
story of China through Needham's remarkable life. Here is an
unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind
itself great--related by one of the world's inimitable storytellers.
