Murder in Canton

In the province of Guangdong, on the estuary where the Pearl River debouches into the South China Sea lies the very large city (more than 13 million inhabitants) of Guangzhou (Canton). The icon of this modern city is the slender, diabolo-form tower designed by the Dutch architects Mark Hemel and Barbara Kuit, opened in 2010. The inhabitants of Guangzhou have bestowed the name Canton Tower on this 600-metre high structure, in homage to the ancient name of their city which has been the most important in South China since time immemorial. From the tower it is possible to get a good view of the Flowery Pagoda, the temple tower built in the eleventh century and, at nearly 60 metres tall, for centuries was the highest structure in Canton. This city forms the backdrop to Murder in Canton, the novel in which Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) sets his Judge Dee to work in a non-fictional city.

Judge Dee was a legendary Chinese judge who lived in the Tang dynasty (618–908). Robert van Gulik, who studied Chinese in Leiden and Utrecht, made an English translation of the original bundle of Chinese stories dating from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which recount three famous murders which this historical judge and master detective solved. As magistrate of a district, Judge Dee was mayor of the city, judge and also the head of the police charge with the responsibility of investigating crimes. To lighten the burden of his work he had a number of assistants who could aid him in the detection. Robert van Gulik’s purpose in translating the original work was to show Western countries that China had its own detective genre and its own Maigret or Sherlock Holmes, aided and abetted by his own Watson.

Judge Dee was to become Robert van Gulik’s own hero because a few years later, encouraged by the many enthusiastic reactions his translation received, he began to write his own Judge Dee stories. He brought the master detective of the Tang dynasty back to life in Judge Dee crime stories he wrote himself. He set these stories in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the period in which the original novel about Judge Dee had been written. In his Judge Dee mysteries he allows the reader to share in his profound knowledge of Chinese culture and his experiences in the Far East. An ingenious plot in an authentic Chinese atmosphere, written according to the canon of the Western detective story, is the foundation of the success of the Judge Dee detective series.

In Murder in Canton Judge Dee has reached the pinnacle of his career. He is President of the Metropolitan Court and advisor to the imperial court in the capital Beijing. He is sent on a secret mission to Canton to investigate the mysterious disappearance of an imperial censor — a highly placed court official. As the most important trading port in South China and terminus of the maritime silk “road”, Canton was a place where the Arabs and Persians who sailed there on ships had settled. Just as it had at the time of Judge Dee’s visit, present-day Guangzhou also has a mosque. Murder in Canton makes no secret of the fact that there were tensions between the Chinese and Arab communities.

After his study of Chinese, Robert van Gulik entered the service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. Besides the diplomatic positions he occupied in China and Japan, he was also posted to the Middle East. From 1956 to 1959 he was Dutch ambassador to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, stationed in Beirut. It was there he acquired the thorough knowledge of the Arab world which was a great help to him when he wrote Murder in Canton. Robert van Gulik wrote this novel in Kuala Lumpur where he had been posted as ambassador from 1959 to 1962, after the completion of his term in Beirut. I went to the international primary school there and revelled in the outdoor life in the tropics. In the evenings I would go out with my parents: to the Chinese theatre resounding with much clatter and spectacle or to the cinema. By the time I was eight, I had seen all Alfred Hitchcock’s films. In the weekend we made trips to famous Chinese temples or other places of interest. My father borrowed ideas for the plots of his Judge Dee novels from his surroundings and from everything he happened to see and experience around him. He always carried small cardboard cards with him on which he would jot down any ideas or interesting observations. He kept these in a box for a new Judge Dee novel. Although he wrote most of his books in two to three months, he spent more time on Murder in Canton because he wanted to do more research into the historical situation there at the time of Judge Dee’s visit. As a sinologist he wanted to be sure that his story was soundly based on fact.

In the traditional Chinese detective story it was customary to have a map of the crime scene on the first pages. Murder in Canton contains this sort of map of the city, on which the various locations which play a part in the story are indicated. The description and location of the Temple of the Flowery Pagoda tally with the eleventh-century, nine-storey Flowery Pagoda in Canton. Judge Dee finds his first clues to the murder of the censor in this temple. Following the old city map, after a short walk, in the same quarter, you come to the Guangxiao (Kwang-siao) Temple, a sixth-century Buddhist temple, now an oasis of calm in the teeming centre of Guangzhou. In Judge Dee’s time, this was already a historical site where he was now confronted with the murder of a young woman.

Robert van Gulik wanted to end his Judge Dee series with Murder in Canton. Judge Dee’s trusted sergeant, Hoong Liang, had already left the scene in The Chinese Nail Murders. Ma Joong, his sturdy assistant, had married and retired. At the end of the story in Murder in Canton, Judge Dee has a narrow escape from death, but his faithful assistant and henchman Chiao Tai has to pay for the attack on Judge Dee with his life. He dies by Judge Dee’s famous sword Rain Dragon, the same sword which had defeated him many years earlier when as outlaws, he and Ma Joong had attempted to rob Judge Dee on his way to his first post in Peng-lai. Impressed by Judge Dee’s skilled swordsmanship and no match for his Rain Dragon, Chiao Tai and Ma Joong decided to enter the service of Judge Dee, the new district magistrate of Peng-lai (see The Chinese Gold Murders).

Robert van Gulik wrote Murder in Canton as his last novel perhaps because he had a premonition that he did not have much longer to live. He was Dutch ambassador in Tokyo when he was diagnosed with lung cancer; the price of forty years of virtually incessant cigarette smoking. Perhaps appropriately for an author of novels, he smoked Golden Fiction, even though he referred to them himself as Golden Friction. He died in 1967 at the age of fifty- seven while on sick leave in The Hague. He was a man who led three lives, summed up in the title of his Dutch biography: sinologist, diplomat and writer. From my place in the first row at his cremation, I had a good view of the decorations and orders of knighthood displayed on his coffin. Fine words were said about his services as a scholar of Chinese and a diplomat, nor were his successful detective novels forgotten. You can have three lives but when you die all three come to a simultaneous end. Judge Dee continues to live on, there was even another new book after Murder in Canton. Robert van Gulik discovered yet another idea for a plot, which he worked out into the novel The Willow Pattern.