The Monkey and the Tiger

‘A Chinese detective novel as a gift’ was the way Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee novel The Morning of the Monkey was announced during the annual Book Festival in the Netherlands in 1964. In these festival weeks, all the bookshops would offer a book as a bonus to all customers. Robert van Gulik dedicated this small book to his faithful friend Bubu, a baby gibbon whom he had found during his posting in Malaysia. On the back of the book is a photo of the author and his gibbon Bubu dating from 1962. In The Morning of the Monkey, Judge Dee receives an unexpected visit from a gibbon who puts him on the track of a murder. The astute judge solves this crime that very afternoon solely on the clue of four amputated fingers and a gold ring.

Robert van Gulik, who was born in Zutphen in the Netherlands in 1910, studied Chinese in Leiden and Utrecht. He entered the service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague and most of his diplomatic postings were to countries in Asia, but he also served in the United States and the Middle-East. He achieved international fame with his Judge Dee novels. Judge Dee was a real historical Chinese judge/magistrate who lived in the Tang dynasty (618–908). Robert van Gulik himself was a passionate fan of detective stories and this interest inspired him to translate the original Chinese book about this master detective and the complicated murder cases he had solved (see Dee Goong An, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee). Robert van Gulik’s purpose in making the translation was to show the West that China had its own detective genre and its own Maigret or Sherlock Holmes.

Encouraged by the many enthusiastic reactions his translation received, among other people from Agatha Christie , Robert van Gulik resurrected the master detective of the Tang dynasty in the Judge Dee novels which he wrote himself. These stories were accompanied by illustrations he had drawn himself, as he preferred in the original Chinese Ming style. In his Judge Dee novels, Robert van Gulik allows the reader to share in his profound knowledge of Chinese culture. The combination of a thrilling crime story and an authentic Chinese atmosphere is what lies at the heart of the success of the Judge Dee mysteries. The series has been translated into twenty-nine languages and published in many countries, most recently in China where readers can now enjoy new stories of their own Judge Dee .

Robert van Gulik had an affinity with monkeys and apes, especially with gibbons, who live in the tree canopy of the jungles of Southeast Asia. Various gibbons were part of the household in the ambassadorial residences in which he lived in the region he was assigned to. During his posting as Dutch ambassador to Malaysia from 1959 to 1962, we had a black gibbon who was called Cheenee. We lived in a residential area in Kuala Lumpur in a house with a large tropical garden. My sister, Pauline, and I each had our own room (my brothers Willem and Pieter were at boarding school in the Netherlands) and Cheenee, she had her own tree in the garden. A gibbon is a graceful, tailless animal who walks upright like a human being and swings itself from branch to branch in the trees by its long arms. Each morning our gibbon greeted the day with a song, a musical call, high in the trees, shaking the branches of her tree to lend strength to her aubade. To us she was more than a pet, she was part of the family who at tea-time would take a piece of fruit or a biscuit uninvited.

Bubu was malnourished and frightened when he was welcomed into our house as a two-month-old baby. My father took over the care of the baby gibbon, personally feeding him cod-liver oil enriched milk from a bottle and mashed banana. Bubu clung close to him and would not let him go literally and metaphorically. He accompanied us on a sea-side holiday to Port Dickson, a place on the West coast of Malaysia where the king of Malaysia had offered my father his summer retreat for our holiday. To my father’s immense grief, Bubu died there, just six months old, struck down by a viral infection. He was buried in a small corner of the royal garden. He spilled his grief for this baby monkey into The Morning of the Monkey.

After his posting in Malaysia, Robert van Gulik was assigned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. We lived in a house in the Ten Hovestraat in a residential quarter of The Hague, and we also had monkeys there. No gibbons, they have to live outside and would not have been able to survive the winters in the Netherlands. Instead we had a capuchin monkey and a patas or hussar monkey. They had their own room at the front on the top storey of the house and many a passer-by stopped to watch the spectacle provided by the monkeys playing in front of the window. During the day they would jump around in their room and at night they slept in a small corner of the central heating expansion tank. When he thought that a visitor had outstayed his or her welcome, my father would say: ‘And now you should meet my monkeys’, and went up to fetch them.

In 1965, Robert van Gulik was appointed Dutch ambassador in Tokyo. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Dutch embassy has been situated on a hill in Tokyo and the residence, which is surrounded by a luxuriant garden, is adjacent to it. On this terrain, untouched since the time it was first allocated the Dutch representation, stand the oldest trees in Tokyo. This suited our white gibbon, Jinja, who could play in this garden to her heart’s content, right down to the ground. My father would regularly stroll through the garden with Jinja on his shoulder. When a colleague once asked him what an ape was doing in the embassy garden, he answered with a smile: ‘She answers the post from The Hague.’ This pronouncement by Her Majesty’s ambassador caused something of a stir in The Hague, with questions even being put to the minister, but this was all soon forgotten in light of all his achievements in Japan in the interest of Dutch businesses.

Besides being a diplomat and author, Robert van Gulik was also a passionate student of Chinese. He wrote a book about his beloved gibbons, The Gibbon in China, which was published posthumously by E.J. Brill in Leiden. Using classical Chinese poetry and Chinese paintings, he compiled a detailed map of the distribution of the gibbon in China. The book also contains a small gramophone record on which the crescendo of the morning call of the gibbon can be heard. He checked the galley proofs of the book during his sick leave in The Hague in the summer of 1967, shortly before his death in September 1967. In the final paragraph, he says that for centuries the gibbon had indeed inspired famous poets and artists in China, but for many, young and old, it had also been a family friend. This made him wonder where the glory of the gibbon was best expressed: in the greatness of classical Chinese literature and painting or perhaps even more poignantly in the rough epitaphs in deserted corners of the garden, on which the pet name of a family friend was written in a childish hand, a name that would be washed away in the next tropical rain storm.

During the Book Festival in 1964, I walked with my father from the Ten Hovestraat to Paagman’s book shop, a nearby book store in The Hague. He had an appointment there to sign his newly published book gift, ‘Vier vingers’. All the Judge Dee books which had then been published were prominently displayed in the shop-window. My thought was that these had now been joined by a book in which our great friend, the gibbon, had given Judge Dee a helping hand in solving a murder. The English version, The Morning of the Monkey, was published together with The Night of the Tiger in the book The Monkey and the Tiger.