People have called van Gulik an amateur genius, because his true profession was a diplomat.
From secretarial officer to staff adviser to consul to ambassador, his career was one smooth success. For European diplomats of his generation, fluency in fifteen languages and the experience of living in places like Batavia, the Hague, Tokyo, Chungking, Washington, New Delhi, Beirut, Damascus, and Kuala Lumpur wouldn't be considered extraordinary perhaps, but his illustrious "amateur careers" are downright astonishing.
He was a musician, instructed in the Chinese lute as a young man by the master Yeh Shih-meng. In Chungking he formed the Heavenly Winds Lute Society with the masters Yu Yu-jen and Feng Yu-hsiang, and in 1940 he wrote The Lore of the Chinese Lute: An Essay in Ch'in Ideology, meticulously translating and annotating a host of references to the Chinese lute in art and literature, including scores, and presenting in the appendix a history of how the study of the Chinese lute was introduced to Japan during the seventeenth century.
He was also a writer of detective fiction. His Judge Dee series of novels, over twenty in all, whose hero is as famous as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, have been translated into numerous languages and are still popular in Europe and the United States. He himself drew the illustrations.
He was without question an outstanding sinologist. He composed poems and antithetical couplets in impeccable classical Chinese, disdaining the vernacular and even the modern innovation of punctuation. He married a Chinese and hobnobbed with such cultural luminaries as Ch'i Pai-shih and Shen Yin-mo, filling his leisure hours with the traditional pursuits of a Chinese literatus: the lute, the game of go, calligraphy, and painting.
He was an avid collector. Lutes, lute scores, calligraphy, porcelain, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean paintings ... all were the objects of his pursuit. He was also an expert connoisseur. He spent more than a decade writing Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur (1958), which runs to nearly 600 pages and contains 160 illustrations, with 42 samples of Chinese and Japanese paper attached at the end.
As a student of sexual life in ancient China, van Gulik wrote Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (1951) and Sexual Life in Ancient China (1961). He also raised gibbons at home and wrote The Gibbon in China, which came complete with a recording of gibbons' cries at the end of the book.
Just as The Gibbon in China was going to press, van Gulik returned home to the Hague from Tokyo and died of cancer at the age of 57. Approaching death, he continued to practice Chinese calligraphy every day, presenting copies to his doctor and nurses, and he completed final proofing of The Gibbon on his deathbed.
That is Robert van Gulik in the eyes of the world.
Reviewing the works and records of his life, even his own family can scarcely believe that one man could be interested in so many things and make such outstanding achievements in researching them at the same time. Just what kind of a father was van Gulik at home? How did he educate his children? What influence did he have on them? The following is an interview with R. H. van Gulik's eldest son, William van Gulik.
Q: Have you ever felt anything special as the son of a legendary figure? Any pressures?
A: You can understand that I am always associated with him. Whenever people meet me, they say, "Ah! Are you the son of...?
I feel no frustration about that. In fact it's rather pleasant, because it means that after so many years he's still famous. I feel no pressure. It's only pleasant to know that you are associated with him. If someone asks me if I'm associated with the famous van Gulik I usually say, "Yes, my father was related to me."
Q: The famous van Gulik the public knows was a great sinologist. Was there another side to him that only you saw?
A: My father was a rather strict man, and we were usually educated at boarding schools. I was not at home very much. My parents moved from country to country, and it wasn't easy to find a good school, not in the U.S. or Japan, but in India, Malaysia, and so on. In my earliest memories,my father liked to wear a loose gown at home and drink tea, play the lute, and practice calligraphy. We were used to it and didn't think it was anything special.
Q: When was the first time you started to read your father's books?
A: That was when they first came out in Dutch. I was fourteen or fifteen, in 1958. I remember that I didn't really sleep very well afterward. I think that was the first time I read a detective novel, and the Chinese methods of crime and punishment were pretty unknown to me. In our school days, of course, the parents would read his novels and my companions at school would hear from their parents, so we realized that there must be something going on. At that time I had no interest in China. Of course, there were so many books around so that once in a while we would pick one up. But at that time there was no particular interest, at least on my side.
Q: Was there any Chinese element in your education?
A: My mother always insisted that I should learn Chinese. It's a pity that I couldn't stay longer with my family and have a good opportunity to learn Chinese. Perhaps I should have picked it up. Usually we were educated at boarding schools. In the Middle East, for instance, there was no opportunity to study Latin and Greek, but my father insisted. So once a day in the afternoon every week we would go to his library. Instead of Chinese lessons it was Latin and Greek. In the family we spoke Dutch and English mixed together. If our parents didn't want us to understand they would use Chinese. I acquired some listening ability from that, so I could understand more or less at the time. Regrettably, whenever I had the opportunity to discuss things with my father we never discussed Oriental studies. It was a great pity that when I decided to study Oriental culture he had already passed away, so I couldn't discuss it with him.
Q: Even though you didn't receive a Chinese-style education, didn't you become aware that you were different from your friends?
A: I'm half Chinese actually. My Dutch friends would say I was an "unpredictable Oriental mystic." I don't know if it has anything to do with my blood, but I feel a lot of people make a fuss about some things unnecessarily, and I try to tell them that everything is related to everything else. You shouldn't get into panic, and if you can't decide it, just let time decide.
Q: Would you talk a bit about your brothers and sisters? Who is following most closely in your father's footsteps?
A: Maybe I am. My sister is living and working in Holland now, but she was in France for a long time. There is a brother in Tokyo working for the Ministry of Economic Affairs department of the Dutch Embassy in Tokyo, promoting industrial relations with Japan. And my youngest brother was in the U.S. doing special research at Wisconsin for years.
Q: What is the most precious thing you have kept as a memory of your father?
A: Well, we have a family rock crystal Kuan-yin at home that is very beautiful and cost my father several months of salary to buy. It is very valuable, which meant that we had to eat only bread for some time, but looking at it, it was all worth it. My father was a very enthusiastic collector, but he did sell at times to support his family.
Q: Next, could you talk about the work in preparing your father's biography?
A: He left a handwritten and partly typed manuscript of about 100 pages that covers his life from childhood up until two years before his death. He kept diaries, but the autobiography is not so elaborate. It's more like an essay of his life, what he thought was important, and the influences that led him in certain directions. We're going to use that as the basis for the whole story. We're looking for a professional biographer, for somebody who is knowledgeable in the field of China and has a good name as a biographer. The book should come out first of all in English, so we're hoping that we might find a British author. We've thought of many ways of doing it. We could publish the whole autobiography along with essays by various people, or we could give somebody all the material and let him make a complete story of it.
Q: Have you made any discoveries about your father that you didn't know before in the course of your work on the book?
A: Yes. It is very interesting to read all the essays people have written. You get curious, trying to bring out more and more, because at a certain point you perceive there are gaps of information, so you try to find them out. The work in itself is a kind of detective story. For example, an official who worked with him in China said that most of the time my father was not in the office but walking around in the streets, going into antique shops, meeting scholars, and talking about art. There was a lot of comment from his superiors about that of course, but eventually they accepted it because that way he had firsthand knowledge about what was going on in the country.
Also, in my father's autobiography he mentions that after he read Jules Verne's The Fascinating Adventure of a Chinese as a boy he put on Chinese clothes and wanted to become a Chinese. It's just as later many people became interested in China after reading my father's novels. You can see how much power a novel can possess. In publishing my father's biography, we also hope to provide people with something different and interesting.
Q: Finally, could you sum up your impression of your father for us?
A: He was a remarkable man.
[Picture Caption]
No matter which country van Gulik was posted to, the layout of his study remained the same. This was his study in Tokyo in 1948.
Sinology was an amateur avocation for van Gulik, but his outstanding achievements in it have made the world forget that his "proper career" was diplomacy.
Van Gulik with a gibbon.
Having raised gibbons, studied their ecology, and written The Gibbon in China, van Gulik can also be termed a zoologist.
Van Gulik was in no way inferior to a traditional Chinese scholar in his proficiency at the lute, chess, painting, and calligraphy.
Some of the lute scores he collected.
The Institute of Sinology at the University of Leiden houses a collection of van Gulik's books and manuscripts.
The Ming dynasty lacquer screen behind Director William van Gulik is one of the pieces acquired by his father.
"Daily life" is a major focus of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. Shown is a toilet acquired from mainland China.
Sinology was an amateur avocation for van Gulik, but his outstanding achievements in it have made the world forget that his "proper career" was diplomacy.
Having raised gibbons, studied their ecology, and written The Gibbon in China, van Gulik can also be termed a zoologist.
Van Gulik was in no way inferior to a traditional Chinese scholar in his proficiency at the lute, chess, painting, and calligraphy.
Some of the lute scores he collected.
Some of the lute scores he collected.
The Institute of Sinology at the University of Leiden houses a collection of van Gulik's books and manuscripts.
The Ming dynasty lacquer screen behind Director William van Gulik is one of the pieces acquired by his father.
"Daily life" is a major focus of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. Shown is a toilet acquired from mainland China.
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