The Willow Pattern

Beijing, the capital of China, is a city full of contrasts. In this modern metropolis lies Tienanmen Square, the symbol of the state, where Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. The square takes its name from the monumental Tienanmen Gate, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, formerly the entrance to the Imperial City which lay beyond it. At its heart is the imperial palace, the Forbidden City, from which for centuries the Chinese emperors ruled the immense Middle Kingdom. The Gate of Heavenly Peace is a link between the centuries-old culture of China and modern history. In the second part of his career, the magistrate and master detective, Judge Dee, was appointed president of the Metropolitan Court (the High Court) in the capital and became a courtier at the court of the emperor.

Robert van Gulik, born in Zutphen in 1910, studied Chinese in Leiden and Utrecht. After having defended his doctoral thesis at the age of twenty-four, he entered the service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. As he was fluent in speaking and writing Oriental languages, most of his diplomatic postings were in countries of the Far East, but he also held posts in the United States, India and the Middle East. He died in 1967 as Dutch ambassador in Tokyo. During his diplomatic life he continued his academic work as a Sinologist and published various books about very diverse topics in the field of Chinese art and culture. However, his greatest international fame comes from his Judge Dee mystery novels, which have been published throughout the whole world in twenty-nine languages.

In the series of novels by Robert van Gulik, young Judge Dee begins his career as a magistrate in Fu-lai (Peng-lai), a harbour city on the north-east coast of China, not far from the unsettled border with Korea. As a magistrate he was in charge of a district, the smallest unit in the old Chinese administrative system. Besides being judge, he was also mayor and the head of the police who was expected to carry out criminal investigations. As administrator of the district he was the ‘father and mother official’ for the people, accessible to everyone, no matter what their descent, rank or class. After Fu-lai, Judge Dee was transferred by Van Gulik to Mien-yuan (Han-yuan) and Kao-yang (Poo-yang). Finally he arrives in Pei-chow, where he astutely but in danger of finding himself on the scaffold because of pronouncing a wrong verdict as judge, is able to solve three repulsive murders. Showered with praise, he is promoted to the honourable position of president of the metropolitan court (the high court) in Beijing by imperial decree and thereby joins the group of direct advisors to the exalted emperor. In The Willow Pattern the capital is in the grip of a fatal epidemic of the plague. The emperor and his court have taken refuge in the mountains and Judge Dee has remained behind to act as governor of the shattered city.

Judge Dee (Di Renjie) was a historical magistrate who lived in the Tang dynasty (618–908), a master detective who was famous for the astute way in which he was able to solve the most complicated murders. Robert van Gulik, who was an ardent fan of detective stories, found a flimsy book about this legendary judge and the murder cases he had solved by an eighteenth-century Chinese author. He translated this book into English and provided it with an introduction in which he gave a description of the ancient Chinese legal system. Robert van Gulik’s purpose in publishing this book (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee) about the original Judge Dee was to show the West that China had its own detective genre and its own Maigret or Sherlock Holmes.

Stimulated by the enthusiastic reactions to his translation, Robert van Gulik brought the master detective of the Tang Dynasty even more to life in mystery stories about Judge Dee which were his own creation. He set these stories against the background of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a period in which the cultural and artist life in China reached dazzling heights. This gave him greater scope to set the scenes for his tales. In his Judge Dee mysteries, Robert van Gulik combined his profound knowledge of ancient Chinese culture and society with an ingenious plot in an authentic Chinese atmosphere.

Van Gulik’s fascination with the Far East had its origins in his youth, much of which he spent in the former Netherlands Indies (now Indonesia). His father had been posted to Batavia as medical officer attached to the Royal Netherlands Indies Army. As a schoolboy, Robert was intrigued by the Chinese characters which he saw on sign boards and scrolls in the Chinese quarters and by the mysterious Chinese temples with their great incense-burners and statues of deities. He used to copy Chinese characters in the sand using a stick. His father had an extensive collection of antique Chinese blue and white porcelain on which he recognized the same characters in the delicate brushwork and the scenes. Undoubtedly it also contained a Chinese flower vase with the famous willow-pattern motif. The blue painted landscape depicts a manor house standing on the water and a row of weeping willow trees. In among them are three small figures on a bridge.

Robert van Gulik wrote The Willow Pattern in The Hague in 1963, after he had completed his appointment in Kuala Lumpur where he had been Dutch ambassador to Malaysia from 1959 to 1962. As was the custom at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an overseas posting was followed by a period of several years at the home-office, in one of the departments of the Ministry in The Hague. During this period we lived in the Ten Hovestraat in The Hague. In Kuala Lumpur we had kept gibbons as pets (see the introduction to The Monkey and the Tiger) and we also had monkeys in the Ten Hovestraat: a capuchin with a plumy tail and a patas (red monkey) from West Africa. They lived in a front room on the top storey of the house. The monkeys playing together at the window were a well-known spectacle in the street many a passer-by stopped to watch.

One of the chief characters in The Willow Pattern is the puppeteer Yuan, and on his shoulder he carries a small monkey who constantly wraps its plumy tail around his neck. My father based not just the monkey but also the puppeteer on a real person. He had made friends with Don Vermeire, a pioneer professional puppeteer who gave regular performances in The Hague. We sometimes visited his house situated between The Hague and Wassenaar. It was actually a disused bunker, a relic of the Second World War. They made plans together to create a Judge Dee puppet series: my father was to write the script and Vermeire would perform it. As a schoolboy my father had had a passion for the Wayang, the venerable Javanese shadow theatre. He collected Wayang puppets, studied the gods who appeared in the Wayang and even gave his own Wayang performances at home (see the introduction to The Red Pavilion). The puppet series about Judge Dee never eventuated, all that remains is the character of Yuan.

As befitted a Chinese scholar, Robert van Gulik based his Judge Dee stories on thorough research and facts he derived from Chinese literature. In his postscript to the book, he writes what he thought about the willow pattern, a decorative motif on China-ware which is famous in the West. In fact, this motif did not originate in China at all, but was invented in England in the eighteenth century taking Chinese pieces as examples. Now Chinese readers can also discover this fact as the whole Judge Dee series has recently been published in a Chinese translation. In this way their hero, Master Detective Dee, is back, in a new series of exciting adventures.

Robert van Gulik’s three lives — as Chinese scholar, diplomat and author of detective stories — were inextricably bound up with each other. He drew his inspiration for his Judge Dee stories from his own environment (whether he was in the Far East or in The Hague), the people he met and the Chinese objets d’art with which he surrounded himself. After a day spent at the embassy, he found writing a Judge Dee novel relaxing. He loved drawing and he furnished all his Judge Dee stories with his own pen drawings, drawn in the style of Chinese book illustrations of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Even the naked women in his drawings are authentic, he borrowed them from erotic literature of the same period (see the introduction to The Chinese Bell Murders). He drew sixteen illustrations for The Willow Pattern, the first is of a flower vase decorated with this motif. Judge Dee finds fragments of it beside a dead man; had the vase been used as a murder weapon?