Robert van Gulik: The Dutch Mandarin

Today, we are going to tell the fascinating story of Robert van Gulik, a Dutch diplomat and sinologist whose writings during the mid-20th century offered the war-torn world a deeper more fact-based view of both modern and ancient China.

In April, French President Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to China ended on a pleasant note with his tweet that read, “Long live the friendship between China and France”. He went on to say that a “hand-in-hand” cultural collaboration would expand significantly in 2024 as that year that marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France.

As part of the state visit, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted an informal meeting with Macron in Guangzhou of South China’s Guangdong Province. The two leaders sipped Chinese tea while enjoying a music piece called Flowing Water that was performed on a 1,267-year-old guqin, a seven-stringed zither-type musical instrument dating back to ancient times.

Flowing Water is a famous guqin melody with a long history, having been referenced in historical literature dating back to the Spring Autumn Period, which lasted from 770 BCE to 476 BCE.

Using a vast array of fingering techniques, the melody evokes vivid images of water flowing throughout its lifecycle, from melting ice to raging rivers before settling down to flow peacefully into the vast ocean. The piece has also grown impressive on a cultural level as today it is associated with the fabled story of enduring friendship between Yu Boya, a public official and guqin master, and Zhong Ziqi, a rustic woodcutter. The pair became soulmates through Zhong’s understanding of Yu’s musical interpretations.

Seven decades ago, during World War II, a Dutch diplomat used to play this same melody for his Chinese friends beside the Jialing River in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality.

The Dutchman was Robert van Gulik, a kind of Oriental Renaissance man who demonstrated wide-ranging interests and intellectual prodigy as a diplomat, writer, sinologist, guqin player, calligrapher, and seal-cutter, as well as a Chinese art connoisseur. He embodied the Chinese ideal of scholar-officials, who applied themselves to the study of liberal arts, on top of occupying prestigious positions in the imperial hierarchy.

Van Gulik was born in 1910 in the Netherlands. As the son of a medical officer in the Dutch army, he lived in present-day Jakarta, Indonesia, from the age of three to twelve. He displayed an interest in Asian languages and culture as a boy, achieving fluency in Malay during elementary studies. The Chinese inscriptions on his father’s collection of porcelain intrigued him, so he started studying Chinese.

He went back to the Netherlands for his college education, studying Chinese and Japanese at the universities of Leiden and later Utrecht. During this period, he added Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Russian to his linguistic repertoire. After obtaining his doctoral degree with a dissertation on the horse-cult in China and Japan, van Gulik joined the Dutch Foreign Service and was stationed in Japan from 1935 to 1942.

Judge Dee Mysteries and Other Studies

In 1940, van Gulik stumbled upon an anonymous 18th-century Chinese novel in an antiquarian bookstore in Tokyo, an encounter that would take his career down an unplanned pathway.

The novel was Four Strange Cases of Empress Wu’s Reign, a fictional account of the deeds of Judge Dee, set in the 7th-century Tang Dynasty. The anonymous author of the novel based Judge Dee on a real historical figure named Di Renjie, who rose from  district magistrate to chancellor during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian.

Van Gulik was so fascinated with Judge Dee that he translated these ancient Chinese detective stories into English during his diplomatic service and published his translation in Tokyo in 1949 as Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee. 

Aside from being a superb translation, he also provided a thorough introduction to Chinese detective novels, the Chinese system of justice, and relevant aspects of Chinese law that were essential to understanding the stories. It even included several of his own Chinese-style illustrations.

After translating Dee Goong An, van Gulik continued the adventures of Judge Dee in a series of original detective stories. He later explained that his intent in writing these stories was to “show modern Chinese and Japanese writers that their own ancient crime-literature has plenty of source material for detective and mystery stories”.

Van Gulik’s first original Judge Dee novel The Chinese Maze Murders was published in Japanese in 1951 and in Chinese in 1953, as he believed the stories would mostly attract the interest of readers from these two cultures. The book was an immediate success, so over the next few years, he followed with two more novels about Judge Dee, The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Lake Murders.

In 1956, he found a publisher for the English versions of these three novels. Subsequently, all his Judge Dee stories were published in English first and translations afterwards. From then till the final days of his life, van Gulik wrote prolifically and eventually authored 16 Judge Dee novels, which altogether constitute Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee.

Van Gulik wrote at a time when British writer Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories had caught the public’s fancy. Fu Manchu was depicted as a super villain from a Chinese imperial family who were on the losing side during the Boxer Rebellion, which was the peasant uprising in 1900 aimed at driving out foreign powers from China. The evil Dr. Fu Manchu personified the genre of the “yellow peril” myth, which expressed Western fears of the expansion of Asian influence. Van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries opened a window for the West to see a more factual and balanced version of China.

Thanks to van Gulik’s writings and translations, Judge Dee became popular internationally. The books have been translated into 29 languages and made available in 38 countries, helping Judge Dee to sometimes be referred to as the “Sherlock Holmes of ancient China”.

In addition to the Judge Dee mysteries, van Gulik also devoted his time to other studies to entertain, illuminate, and promote many aspects of Chinese culture, from the sexual practices of ancient Chinese to the most revered Chinese musical instrument - the guqin.

As a scholar, he is probably best known for his groundbreaking studies on the history of sexuality in China. His 1951 Erotic Color Prints of the Ming Dynasty and Sexual Life in Ancient China and 1961 Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from circa 1500 BC-AD 1644 provide Western readers with an insight into the sexual culture, erotic arts, and lute culture in ancient China.

The significance of these studies, according to Shi Ye, van Gulik expert and professor with Shanghai Normal University, lies in the placement of material culture within the history of sexuality, creating a perfect example of the new cultural history.

Fascination with Guqin

Van Gulik has always been fascinated with the tastes and preferences of Chinese scholar-officials, whose favorite pastime was guqin.

During his stint in Japan from 1935 to 1942, van Gulik became interested in guqin. On his first visit to Beijing in 1936, he purchased a guqin made in the Qing Dynasty and became a pupil of master Ye Shimeng, niece of the Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing Dynasty.

Van Gulik named his guqin “pine wind”, alluding to the Southern Dynasties Daoist Tao Hongjing, who enjoyed listening to the sound of wind rustling in the pine forest. Back in Japan, he bought a tuning whistle, had a special qin table made, practiced on his beloved qin, and took lessons from a Chinese guqin master in Tokyo.

Master Ye Shimeng firstly taught van Gulik Three Variations on the Plum Blossom. The plum blossom is known to withstand rigorous winter weather, and yet its delicate fragrant flowers blossom amid the bitter chill; therefore, it is often used to describe people with a noble personality. 

Van Gulik learned a total of ten guqin pieces from Ye and respected the master deeply. He was extremely saddened when Ye died and dedicated his 1940 monograph The Lore of the Chinese Lute to his memory.

In this study on the history and ideology of guqin, van Gulik combined a player’s appreciation and enthusiasm with a Sinologist’s objective and historically informed insight. He traced the evolution of the guqin melody and ideology and correlated them with larger historical changes and cultural trends through different dynastic periods.

He chose to use the word “lute” instead of the usual term “zither” to refer to guqin, because lute is the word that “since olden times in the West has been associated with all that is artistic and refined, and sung by poets”. With this unusual choice of name, van Gulik set the tone for his interpretation of the ideological meaning of guqin as the highest symbol and expression of the Chinese literati culture.

He followed up one year later with another valuable publication on guqin, Hsi Kang and His Poetical Essay on the Lute. Much of the reputation of guqin outside China may be attributed to his works, arguably the first academic on the ideology of guqin and major non-Chinese source for the study of guqin in general.

After Japan declared war on the Netherlands in 1941, van Gulik was evacuated together with other diplomatic staff of the Dutch mission. He spent most of the rest of World War II as the first secretary of the Dutch delegation to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in the temporary capital of Chongqing.

It was in Chongqing that he met Shui Shifang, granddaughter of Zhang Zhidong, one of the four most famous officials in the late Qing Dynasty known for advocating controlled reform and modernization. Shui, who also worked in the Dutch Embassy, first tutored van Gulik in Mandarin then soon became his wife. They went on to have four children. Once in an interview, Shui said that the four years van Gulik spent in Chongqing were the happiest of his life.

With much of the heartland of China occupied by the Japanese, intellectuals and artists flocked to Chongqing, which enabled van Gulik to meet and befriend many well-known guqin players, including local guqin master Yang Shaowu and Zhejiang guqin master Xu Yuanbai.

In 1945, Van Gulik supported the foundation of the Chongqing Tianfeng Qin Society and participated keenly in the performance and discussions of the Society, of which there were quite a few socialites among its founding members. Van Gulik took this opportunity to build rapport with them, including Christian warlord Feng Yuxiang, as well as senior Kuomintang leader and calligraphy master Yu Youren. His fellow diplomat Chen Zhimai remembered watching him play a few guqin tunes to entertain friends after dinner on several occasions.

After World War II, van Gulik embarked on a succession of foreign service posts in the US, India, the Middle East, Malaysia, and Japan. Despite constantly moving, he continued his scholarly activities, researching, translating, editing, and writing. He died from cancer in The Hague at an early age of 57 in 1967, while serving as the Dutch ambassador to Japan.

In 2014, van Gulik’s family donated a total of 116 pieces of his collection to the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing. These included his “pine wind” guqin, rosewood desk, collected antiques and his own calligraphy, paintings, and writings. 

Indeed, Van Gulik realized his dream of becoming one of those Chinese scholar-officials, who also wrote poetry, practiced calligraphy and painting, and played music in their spare time. One can easily sympathize with Chen Zhimai’s comment when watching van Gulik play Flowing Water for his Chinese friends beside the Jialing River:

For how could we help being enthralled by this young man from Europe, whose physical features were anything but Chinese, playing for us this tune which had remained in the Chinese mind for two thousand years.

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Lü Weitao, translator Yang Guang, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.