The Haunted Monastery

An interminably lengthy taxi ride through the barely crawling traffic in Beijing brings me to the Monastery of the Hall of the White Clouds. This ancient Taoist monastery is situated in an unremarkable quarter of the city. As I stroll past a number of small stalls selling souvenirs and incense, a female fortune-teller beckons me from behind her tiny table. A large gate topped by a board bearing the name of the monastery (Baiyunguan) in Chinese characters leads through into a spacious inner courtyard. Innumerable joss sticks, which can be purchased at the entry gate to be lit to invoke the favour of the gods, smoulder in an beautifully decorated earthenware jar filled with sand. The air is heavy with the fragrant scent of the smouldering sticks. Monks clad in long black robes and wearing black caps walk in and out of the buildings around the courtyard. Brightly coloured statues of Taoist saints, each face distorted by a demonic expression, stand in niches. You can wander from one building to the other along paths bordered by red-lacquered balustrades and enjoy a splendid view over the inner court from every angle.

I am in Beijing with my brother and sister on our way to Chongqing (Chungking) to attend a symposium to commemorate the hundredth birthday of our father Robert van Gulik (1910–1967). The purpose of the symposium which is being held in the National Museum (China Three Gorges Museum) is to draw attention to the contributions this Dutch Sinologist made to the cultural and literary scene in China.

Robert van Gulik studied Sinology and Oriental Literature in Leiden and Utrecht. After he had written his doctoral thesis on the horse cult in China, he entered the service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. Following his first posting in Tokyo, because of his expertise on China in 1943 he was dispatched to Chongqing, the wartime capital of China, where the Dutch embassy had been established for the duration of the Japanese occupation. While on a visit to Beijing in 1946 he paid a visit to the Monastery of the Hall of the White Clouds. He was acquainted with the abbot of the monastery An Shilin, an enlightened man who enjoyed a reputation as a great scholar and an exquisite player of the Chinese seven-stringed lute, one of the oldest musical instruments in China. There is a photo of Robert van Gulik sitting alongside An Shilin while the latter plays a lute placed on a stone table in a rock garden behind the monastery. I stroll through the same rock garden which still forms part of the monastery and climb up one of the many flights of stairs leading up to the monastery buildings. No great stretch of the imagination is needed to see Judge Dee mount the stairs in this ‘Morning Cloud Monastery’ as this is described in The Haunted Monastery.

However, it turned out that in secret this enlightened An Shilin was carrying out dubious experiments involving young women. When these outrages came to light in 1947, he was buried alive by the monks of the monastery. The monastery and the shocking story of its widely respected abbot provided the inspiration for The Haunted Monastery, Robert van Gulik’s fifth Judge Dee novel, which was first published in 1962.

Robert van Gulik created the historical Chinese detective Dee, who plays the principal role in his Judge Dee mysteries, in the likeness of Sherlock Holmes and Maigret. The stories are set in seventeenth-century China during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a time at which China was enjoying an enormous cultural florescence. The historical judge Dee had lived nearly a thousand years earlier, but the Ming period allowed the author greater freedom of choice for the setting of his stories. Therefore he drew his illustrations in the original Chinese style of this era.

The Judge Dee series gives the reader a good picture of seventeenth-century Chinese society. Judge Dee had three wives as was the custom in China at that time. In The Haunted Monastery Judge Dee mentions in passing that the four of them did not sleep together, but each had her own bedroom and that he took it in turns to spend the night with one of them. We also learn that at this time in China there were two religions: Confucianism, the state religion which was founded on a set of rules about how to behave properly, and Taoism, which provided a more mystical experience replete with an abundance of symbolism and magical services. Taoism carried on from where Confucianism left off, the author has Sun, Judge Dee’s opponent, say in the book. As the personification of authority Judge Dee is a staunch Confucianist who finds himself in conflict with the esoteric doctrine of Taoism practised in the monastery. Nevertheless, he does say of Taoism that, ‘It is at least a purely Chinese creed, and not an importation from the barbarous West [here referring to India and Tibet], like Buddhism.’ Nevertheless, nowadays Buddhism has the largest number of adherents in China.

Robert van Gulik wrote The Haunted Monastery in 1959 in Beirut, Lebanon, where he was Dutch ambassador from 1956–1959. We lived in the former residence of the Turkish governor of Lebanon under Ottoman rule. The white marble hall was so immense I could easily career around it on my small child’s bike. In the deep cellars were storerooms with barred windows in which, I was told, disobedient visitors were once incarcerated. They would have been a suitable setting for the Gallery of Horrors described in The Haunted Monastery.

The Haunted Monastery takes place in the space of one night in the Morning Cloud Monastery, an ancient Taoist monastery situated high up against a steep cliff. The monastery was built on a ground-plan which, as befitted Taoist tradition, reflected the structure of the Universe. Chronologically this novel is the sequel to The Chinese Lake Murders, set in Han-yuan, the district to which Judge Dee had been appointed magistrate by imperial decree.

One of the most intriguing aspects of The Haunted Monastery is the striking similarity between it and The Name of the Rose, the famous 1980 novel by Umberto Eco. The action of both novels takes place in a isolated monastery in which mysterious murders have been committed. Important themes in both books described by their authors are a religious antithesis and the improper practices between the residents of the monastery and women. Unquestionable similarities can also be seen even in the climax of both novels, but I shall not reveal them at this point.

Again I walk through the gate of the Monastery of the Hall of the White Clouds, this time on my way out. The sky has grown overcast and a thunder storm has just burst. In the pouring rain, tarpaulins are being spread out over the small stalls. The fortune-teller has folded up her table and has sought shelter under one of the tarpaulins. As I look back, through the pouring rain I see the wraithlike contours of the monastery roofs. Judge is Dee is in for a heavy night. Through a monastery window he catches sight of people who are not there and in the corridors he hears the voices of invisible inhabitants. In the haunted monastery he is confronted with multiple murders and a Taoist mastermind.