The Chinese Maze Murders

In 1979, the famous Dutch author Jan Wolkers visited the exhibition Asiatic Art in Private Collections in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He felt especially drawn to the fourteenth-century painting by the Chinese artist Sun Chün-Tse entitled Tung-fang Shuo steals the Peach of Immortality. Both the scene depicted and the title made such an impression on him that he chose: De perzik van onsterfelijkheid (The Peach of Immortality), as the title of his next novel, published in 1980. The ambition of the protagonist of Wolter’s book, Ben Ruwiel, is to steal the peach of immortality. This painting and a number of other scrolls came from the collection of Robert van Gulik (1910–1967), the Chinese scholar, diplomat and writer who had become world famous with his Judge Dee crime novels.

After his university studies in Leiden and obtaining his doctorate degree in Utrecht, Robert van Gulik entered the service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. In view of his knowledge of East Asian languages, he spent a long period of his career working in the Dutch embassies in China and Japan. He was a passionate collector of Chinese art and literature and, in whatever city in the world he happened to be, he was always acquainted with all the antique-dealers and antiquarian booksellers. In one such antiquarian bookshop in Tokyo he came across a rather curious small eighteenth-century book about the legendary Chinese judge, Judge Dee (Di Renjie). This collection of three intertwining stories recounts how the judge and master detective Dee, who lived in the Tang dynasty (618–908), solves three complicated murder cases. Robert van Gulik, who was a great fan of detective novels, translated this original Chinese detective story into English. The reason he wanted to translate it was to show the West that China had its own detective genre and, in the person of the popular hero Judge Dee, its own Maigret or Sherlock Holmes.

Judge Dee also became Robert van Gulik’s hero, because a few years later, encouraged by the many enthusiastic reactions he had received to his translation, he brought the master detective of the Tang dynasty back to life in the Judge Dee novels he wrote himself. He set his stories in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644); a period in which cultural and artistic life in China attained a zenith. This offered him greater scope to create the settings of his stories. In his Judge Dee stories, Robert van Gulik allows his readers to share in his profound knowledge of Chinese culture and history. An ingenious plot in an authentic Chinese atmosphere, written according to the rules of Western detective fiction, forms the foundation for the success of the Judge Dee series. Each novel has an academically sound Postscript in which Robert van Gulik describes the ancient Chinese legal system and sheds more light on the incidents which occur in the novel.

Alongside his diplomatic work, Robert van Gulik also remained active as a scholar of Chinese. Through his interest in Judge Dee, he went more deeply into the study of the ancient Chinese judicial system and translated a thirteenth-century Chinese manual for judges-magistrates into English (Parallel Cases from under the Pear-Tree, Leiden, 1956). The crimes solved in this book provided an extra source of inspiration for the plots of his own Judge Dee novels. His scientific work ranged over extremely diverse subjects — from Chinese ink-stones to the seven-stringed Chinese lute. However, his magnum opus is an extensive work about the art of Chinese painting and its technical aspects (Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur, Rome, 1958).

Robert van Gulik wrote his Judge Dee mystery The Chinese Maze Murders in 1950 during his second posting to the Dutch embassy in Tokyo. As was his custom with the majority of Judge Dee novels, he wrote the original manuscript in English. He drew original illustrations in the Ming dynasty style. The book was translated into Japanese by a Japanese sinologist whom he had befriended and offered it to a publisher in Tokyo. The latter was prepared to publish it but only if there was a naked woman on the cover, as this would make the book sell better. Van Gulik knew of no examples of erotic art in China, but he put the question to various book-sellers and antiquarians in China and Japan. To his amazement, he received a reaction from a book-seller in Shanghai who had found an erotic Ming album. An antique-dealer in Kyoto answered that he could offer him the original woodblocks of a similar Ming album. Robert van Gulik’s conclusion was that a form of erotic art had certainly existed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century China. Therefore he drew a naked woman for the cover of the Japanese edition of The Chinese Maze Murders (see the illustration ‘Black Orchid surprised in the bath’) in the genuine Ming style. He would follow this original example in many more illustrations for his Judge Dee novels. This was the way he discovered about the then as yet unknown erotic culture of the Ming dynasty and he made a profound study of it. The result was a monograph about the erotic Ming album which he had found, to which he added prints made from the original woodblocks (Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period, Tokyo, 1951). This was distributed as a limited edition, hand-written manuscript and the offer was restricted to some fifty university libraries. Afterwards Van Gulik planed the woodblock prints smooth. His next academic work discussed the sexual life in old China (Sexual Life in Ancient China, Leiden, 1961), in which with an eye for discretion he wrote all the explicit passages in Latin. To the present day both publications are regarded as the standard works in this field. His activities as diplomat, academic and writer of detective novels were intricately bound up with each other in a high degree of synergy.

The Chinese Maze Murders belongs to the first series of five Judge Dee novels (see the Introduction to The Chinese Gold Murders). These were written in the traditional style of Chinese crime novels, including a large number of characters both major and minor. As was the custom, a plan was added to The Chinese Maze Murders on which all the places in the city where some part of the action took place are indicated. Lan-fang was located in the north-west of China (Xinjiang region) close to the border of the area of the Uighurs, a region which even in the time of Judge Dee was fraught with tension. Van Gulik borrowed the three murders which are solved in it from the thirteenth-century manual for judges-magistrates (Parallel Cases from under the Pear-Tree) mentioned earlier. Hence they were all true crimes.

My father often had connoisseurs and friends to visit and he would discuss scroll paintings in his collection with them. The rolled up paintings were neatly stored in the drawers of a Chinese cupboard where they did not take up much room, an impossibility with Western paintings. As far as I was concerned, these were interminable sessions in which one after the other scroll paintings would be hung up on the wall, discussed at length and then rolled up again. I was allowed to help with rolling up the paintings, but found it very difficult to do this deftly. The scroll painting Tung-Fang Steals the Peach of Immortality will undoubtedly have been one of them, together with other depictions of Chinese landscapes painted in pale-wash colours; however, there was only one painting which held the key to the repulsive secret of the maze of Lan-fang.