Dee Goong An

In 2011 The Netherlands was the guest country at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIB), the largest of its kind in China and attracted two hundred thousand visitors that year. In the Dutch pavilion, twenty Dutch writers and the representatives of fifteen Dutch publishers presented their books. This exposition also included an exhibition of one of the best-known Dutch authors in China, Robert van Gulik (1910–1967). His Judge Dee detective novels which have been translated into Chinese enjoy enormous popularity and various television adaptations have been broadcast as Judge Dee series. I was attending the Beijing Book Fair to give a lecture about the work of Robert van Gulik in conjunction with the exhibition. When I had finished, a reporter asked me how a Dutchman born in Zutphen, a small town in The Netherlands, had been able to write detective novels about this Chinese magistrate and set him in seventeenth-century China.

Robert van Gulik studied Chinese in Leiden and Utrecht. He entered the service of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague and was posted to the Dutch embassy in Tokyo as a diplomat in 1935. In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, the Second World War broke out in the Far East. After war was declared on Japan, all the allied embassies were closed and the Western diplomatic representatives exchanged. The entire diplomatic corps was evacuated and embarked on a steamship, the Tatsuta Maru, which was moored ready to sail in the harbour of Yokohama. Diplomats were allowed to take only one single suitcase with them. Robert van Gulik grabbed a few small Chinese books from his study and stuffed them into his suitcase. One of these books happened to be an eighteenth-century crime story in which the detective was the legendary Chinese judge, Di Renjie, who solves three cases of murder.

As an ardent fan of detectives stories — he devoured them like hot cakes — he translated the Chinese crime novel into English and published it in a limited edition of five hundred (signed) copies. He gave the book its Chinese title Dee Goong An; Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee and designed a Chinese-style wood-block print for the cover. His desire was that this translation would show the West that China had its own detective genre and its own Sherlock Holmes, complete with his own Watson figure. Judge Dee also became Robert van Gulik’s hero, because a few years later, inspired by the many enthusiastic reactions to his translation, he wrote his own Judge Dee stories. He set them in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the period in which the original novel about the murder cases solved by Judge Dee was written. In his books, he could make good use of his profound knowledge of Chinese culture and of his experiences in the Far East. An ingenious plot in an authentic Chinese setting, written according to the rules of western detective stories, was the foundation of the success of the Judge Dee detective series.

Between 1950 and 1967 Robert van Gulik was to write sixteen Judge Dee mysteries, including two collections of short stories. In the series we follow Judge Dee in his career during which, as a district magistrate, he was transferred from the one provincial city to another. The Judge Dee stories have been published in twenty-nine languages throughout the world and millions of copies of them have been sold. Celebrated cases of Judge Dee includes a foreword by the author, in which he describes all the characteristics of the classic Chinese detective novel. This academic essay also provides the justification for the Judge Dee novels which were his own creation.

I shared a part of my youth with Judge Dee. My bedroom was next door to my father’s study and in the evenings I usually fell asleep to the clattering of his typewriter. Sometimes the typewriter fell silent and all I could hear was him humming away to himself. Once I asked what he always hummed and he told me that they were Sanskrit songs. This was his way of pondering over his story and the manuscript; I think it was also a sort of relaxation. In the margins and between the lines, the typed sheets were crammed full with additions and notes. He drew his own illustrations for the Judge Dee stories, in the Chinese style of the Ming period. I used to gaze in wonder at the long piece of ash on end of the cigarette which was invariably held between his lips when he was occupied with a pen drawing. Just at the very last moment he would flick the ash off over an ashtray, without any of it falling on the drawing.

On my way back from the Beijing International Bookfair, it struck me that the circle was now rounded. Robert van Gulik translated Judge Dee from Chinese to show the West that China had its own literary tradition of detective novels. Afterwards he wrote his own stories about this Chinese master detective and published them in the West. Now the Judge Dee novels which were his own invention have in their turn been translated into Chinese. Readers in China now have even more exciting adventures of their master detective to enjoy.