Dr. van Gulik playing Guqin with Taoist friend
In Memory of the Last Chinese
Dr.R.H.van Gulik
In Memory of the Last Chinese
Dr.R.H.van Gulik Dr. van Gulik playing Guqin with Taoist friend
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Having raised gibbons, studied their ecology, and written The Gibbon in China, van Gulik can also be termed a zoologist. Western sinology has produced a number of erudite and influential scholars, but the name of only one is as well known to the general public as it is to the scholars of academe. His storybook life and multifarious works remain scintillating even today and stimulate interest in Chinese culture among people everywhere in the West. The Dutch sinologist Dr. Robert Hans van Gulik (1910-1967) passed away 22 years ago. 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 s eventeenth 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 Marpie, 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 pur-suits 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 at-tached 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 Andent 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. |
