Robert van Gulik
Robert van Gulik | |
---|---|
Born | 9 August 1910 |
Died | 24 September 1967 | (aged 57)
Spouse | Shui Shifang |
Children | Willem, Pieter, Pauline, Thomas |
Signature | |
Robert Hans van Gulik (Chinese: 髙羅佩; pinyin: Gāo Luópèi, 9 August 1910 – 24 September 1967) was a Dutch orientalist, diplomat, musician (of the guqin), and writer, best known for the Judge Dee historical mysteries, the protagonist of which he borrowed from the 18th-century Chinese detective novel Dee Goong An.
Life
Robert van Gulik was born in
He was in Tokyo when Japan declared war on the Netherlands in 1941, but he, along with the rest of the Allied diplomatic staff, was evacuated in 1942. He spent most of the rest of World War II as the secretary for the Dutch mission to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government in Chongqing. While in Chongqing, he married a Chinese woman, Shui Shifang (Chinese: 水世芳) (1912-2005), the daughter of a Qing dynasty Imperial mandarin, and they had four children together. There he freely mingled with prominent figures in traditional and modern Chinese culture, though he had little interest in China's modernization and the intellectual changes since the New Culture Movement. [2]
Van Gulik was an accomplished
: Gāo Luópèi).After the war ended, he returned to the Netherlands, then went to the United States as the counsellor of the Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C. He returned to Japan in 1949 and stayed there for the next four years. While in Tokyo, he published his first two books, the translation
Judge Dee mysteries
During World War II van Gulik translated the 18th-century detective novel Dee Goong An into English under the title Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (first published in Tokyo in 1949). The main character of this book, Judge Dee, was based on the real statesman and detective Di Renjie, who lived in the 7th century, during the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907), though in the novel itself elements of Ming dynasty China (AD 1368–1644) were mixed in.[5]
Thanks to his translation of this largely forgotten work, van Gulik became interested in Chinese detective fiction. To the translation he appended an essay on the genre in which he suggested that it was easy to imagine rewriting some of the old Chinese case histories with an eye toward modern readers. Not long afterward he himself tried his hand at creating a detective story along these lines. This became the book The Chinese Maze Murders (completed around 1950). As van Gulik thought the story would have more interest to Japanese and Chinese readers, he had it translated into Japanese by a friend (finished in 1951), and it was sold in Japan under the title Meiro-no-satsujin. With the success of the book, van Gulik produced a translation into Chinese, which was published by a Singapore book publisher in 1953. The reviews were good, and van Gulik wrote two more books (The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Lake Murders) over the next few years, also with an eye toward Japanese and then Chinese editions. Next, van Gulik found a publisher for English versions of the stories, and the first such version was published in 1957. Later books were written and published in English first; the translations came afterwards.[5]
Van Gulik's intent in writing his first Judge Dee novel was, as he wrote in remarks on The Chinese Bell Murders, "to show modern Chinese and Japanese writers that their own ancient crime-literature has plenty of source material for detective and mystery-stories".[6] In 1956, he published a translation of the T'ang-yin-pi-shih ("Parallel Cases from Under the Pear Tree"), a 13th-century casebook for district magistrates. He used many of the cases as plots in his novels (as he states in the postscripts of the novels).
Van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries follow in the long tradition of Chinese detective fiction, intentionally preserving a number of key elements of that writing culture. Most notably, he had Judge Dee solve three different (and sometimes unrelated) cases in each book, a traditional device in Chinese mysteries. The whodunit element is also less important in the Judge Dee stories than it is in the traditional Western detective story, though still more so than in traditional Chinese detective stories. Nevertheless, van Gulik's fiction was adapted to a more Western audience, avoiding the supernatural and religious traditions of Buddhism and Daoism in favour of rationality.[7]
Friends and even his daughter, Pauline, said that he identified with Judge Dee. He lived the life of a mandarin who cultivated calligraphy, poems and paintings. When he started writing the stories in 1949, he was in a conservative and nostalgic mood, remarking "Judge Dee, it's me".[8]
Other works
Robert van Gulik studied Indisch Recht (Dutch Indies law) and Indologie (Indonesian culture) at Leiden University from 1929 until 1934, receiving his doctorate for a dissertation on the horse cult in Northeast Asia at Utrecht University. Though he made his career in the Dutch diplomatic service, he kept up his studies. During his life he wrote twenty-odd essays and monographs on various subjects, mainly but not exclusively on aspects of Chinese culture. Typically, much of his scholarly work was first published outside the Netherlands. In his lifetime van Gulik was recognized as a European expert on Imperial Chinese jurisprudence.
Van Gulik was interested in Chinese painting. For example, in his book The Gibbon in China (1967), he devotes pages to the
Bibliography
Library and personal archive
In 1977 part of the library of Robert van Gulik was acquired from the heirs of Van Gulik for the Sinological Institute at
Footnotes
- ^ Benedetti (2014), p. 13.
- ^ Benedetti (2014), p. 14-15.
- ^ John C. H. Wu, "Book review" {of T'ang-yin-pi-shih}, in Monumenta Serica, v.17, pp. 474-478 (1958)
- ^ "R.H. van Gulik (1910 - 1967)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 27 July 2015.
- ^ a b Herbert, Rosemary. (1999) "Van Gulik, Robert H(ans)",
in Herbert, The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Oxford, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507239-1.pp. 38–9.
- ^ Marco Huysmans. "Rechter Tie / Robert van Gulik". rechtertie.nl.
- ^ Wright, Daniel Franklin (2004). Chinoiserie in the novels of Robert Hans van Gulik (M.A. thesis) Wilfrid Laurier University
- ^ Benedetti (2014), p. 15.
- ^ Van Gulik, Robert (1967). The Gibbon in China: An Essay in Chinese Animal Lore. Leiden: E. J. Brill. pp. 94–95.
- ^ Geissmann, Thomas (May 2008). "Gibbon Paintings in China, Japan, and Korea: Historical Distribution, Production Rate and Context Archived December 17, 2008, at the Wayback Machine". Gibbon Journal, No. 4.
- ^ Collection Guide to the Robert Hans van Gulik collection, 25 May 2023.
- ^ Donation of personal archive and collection of Leiden Sinologist Robert van Gulik, 25 May 2023.
References
- Benedetti, Lavinia (2014). "Killing Digong: Rethinking Van Gulik's Translation of Late Qing Dynasty Novel Wu Zetian Si Da Qi'an". Ming Qing Studies: 11–42.
- ——— (2017). Storia del giallo in Cina, dai casi giudiziari al romanzo di crimine. Roma: Aracne. OCLC 1020761193.
- OCLC 902136955.
- OCLC 38580261. - the above 1989 work in English translation
- OCLC 974172095.
- OCLC 982428757. - English translation by Rosemary Robson of 1993 work
External links
- Works by Robert van Gulik at Faded Page (Canada)
- "The Dutch mandarin: Robert van Gulik". Radio Netherlands Archives. 11 November 1996. Retrieved 17 April 2019.
- "John Thompson's collected anecdotes on van Gulik's Guqin artistry". Retrieved 17 April 2019.
- "Judge Dee website". Retrieved 17 April 2019.
- "The Dutch language Rechter Tie website". Retrieved 17 April 2019.
- Collection Guide to the Robert Hans van Gulik collection at Leiden University Libraries, 25 May 2023.
- Van Gulik Collection, at Brill Publishers
- [1]