In collecting Chinese antiquities, R.H. van Gulik adhered to a rather unusual principle. Instead of searching for rarities, he collected pieces that most people didn't pay much attention to.

For Chinese collectors, he once said, an incomplete or flawed piece was worthless, but that was just what he looked for. A Chinese lute with peeling paint could still produce beautiful tones, and a fragment of exquisite chinaware was as lustrous as the whole.

These words help to clarify the fundamental attitude that lay behind his research and writing as well. His interests were astonishingly broad, and the dozens of books and articles he wrote during his life were mostly the fruits of painstaking research on subjects that came to him on the spur of the moment, precisely like an untrammeled Chinese gentleman-scholar "following his interests wherever they lead."

Embroidering a bit on reality perhaps, some people describe the origin of the Judge Dee novels this way: van Gulik was translating the Ch'ing dynasty detective novel Dee Gong An when he decided in a sudden fit of impatience that he might as well write one himself.

According to his preface to Dee Gong An, the reason he translated the novel and became interested in Judge Dee, the renowned physician-detective of the T'ang dynasty, was that many people had mistakenly come to believe that detective fiction had been written nowhere outside of Britain, the United States, France, and Germany. In his view, despite lacking the gimmicks of fingerprints and photography, Chinese fictional detectives were in no way inferior to Sherlock Holmes in the meticulousness of their investigations and the marvelousness of their solutions.

Inspired by traditional Chinese fiction, van Gulik created his Judge Dee series of novels, which have proved perennial favorites in Europe and the United States. Most Western writers of novels with a Chinese setting lavishly describe pigtails, bound feet, opium smoking, and the like and even concoct absurdities of their own invention to pique the reader's interest.

Van Gulik not only disdained that approach, he earnestly explained at the end of each book that pigtails were a custom introduced by the Manchus in 1644 and were not seen in China during the time of Judge Dee (630 to 700 A.D.); that men and women wore long robes like kimonos; that kimonos were actually brought to Japan from China during the T'ang dynasty; that tobacco and opium were introduced to China only centuries later and that the common beverages were tea and rice wine....

In fact, the strong anti-Buddhist tone of The Chinese Bell Murders, which for a time prevented the book's being published in Japan, faithfully reflects the attitude of Confucian intellectuals during the T'ang dynasty. R. H. van Gulik's eldest son, William, says that the inclusion of his father's detective novels on student reading lists at several colleges in the United States indicates that besides affording entertainment, the books can also provide the reader with an overview of the legal background and social history of T'ang dynasty China.

If his detective novels were a by-product of his studies of Chinese culture, then his research and writings on relations between the sexes in ancient China were even more the results of fortuitous happenstance.

When van Gulik was posted to Japan again after the Second World War, he tried to have The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Maze Murders published there. The former book was rejected because of its anti-Buddhist sentiments, while Maze Murders, already translated into Japanese, ran into a different problem: the publisher insisted on putting a nude on the cover.

Van Gulik, who insisted on using a genuine ancient Chinese print, felt that nude pictures were an impossibility in ancient China given the restraints of traditional etiquette. With both sides sticking to their guns, he wrote to several Chinese and Japanese antique dealers asking if such pictures existed. To his surprise, an antique dealer in Kyoto immediately offered a set of old printing blocks to an erotic album of the Ming dynasty called Hua-ying-chin-chen, or Variegated Battle-arrays of the Flowery Camp, and a bookstore in Shanghai was willing to provide copies of a similar album from the late Ming.

A connoisseur of Chinese prints to begin with and intrigued by the fine set of prints he had acquired, van Gulik began collecting information and materials on the sex life of the Chinese in traditional society, referring particularly to Taoist manuals on the conjugal arts and to fiction and poems throughout the ages that described relations between men and women.

Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period was printed in Tokyo in 1951 in three large volumes, the first consisting of a historical survey, the second of Chinese texts, and the third of a reprint of the Hua-ying-chin-chen album.

Because the book did after all involve lewd and indecent material, only 50 sets were published and distribution was limited to major centers of research and national libraries.

The book attracted the attention of a number of sinologists whose discussion and correspondence provided van Gulik with additional information. Ten years later he completed Sexual Life in Ancient China, published in the Netherlands in 1961.

Because it was intended for sale to the public, this volume contained no indecent pictures, and quotations of questionable taste, following the tradition of the Western gentleman-scholar, were suitably translated into Latin.

Both works opened new ground in the study of Chinese social history and are respected academically even today as valuable sources of information. And the conclusion reached by van Gulik after dozens of years of exhaustive research was--sex life in ancient China was normal and natural. Notwithstanding the appearance of Taoist sex manuals, it was in fact the constant efforts of Chinese people over some 2,000 years in studying how to balance relations between the sexes that enabled them to maintain their vitality and continue and renew the race.

Sexual Life in Ancient China is available in Taipei in several English-language bookstores, and people occasionally inquire at various academic institutions about the possibility of photocopying Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period. The vigilance and circumspection displayed by the librarian in the van Gulik room at the Leiden University library when this reporter visited the collection, however, were probably right in line with the wishes of Dr. van Gulik.

[Picture Caption]

Detective novels and an investigation of "the arts of the bedchamber" were byproducts of R.H. van Gulik's sinological studies.

A page of the manuscript of van Gulik's Dee Gong An.

Illustrations to chapters five, nine, fifteen, and 23 of Dee Gong An (from left).

Van Gulik executed the illustrations to Dee Gong An himself. His initials are in the lower left corner.

Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period produced heated discussions among Western sinologists.

A page of the manuscript of van Gulik's Dee Gong An.

Illustrations to chapters five, nine, fifteen, and 23 of Dee Gong An （from left）.

Illustrations to chapters five, nine, fifteen, and 23 of Dee Gong An （from left）.

Illustrations to chapters five, nine, fifteen, and 23 of Dee Gong An （from left）.

Illustrations to chapters five, nine, fifteen, and 23 of Dee Gong An （from left）.

Van Gulik executed the illustrations to Dee Gong An himself. His initials are in the lower left corner.

Van Gulik executed the illustrations to Dee Gong An himself. His initials are in the lower left corner.