The Lacquer Screen

Wherever in the world my family home happened to be, one of the fixed features of its interior decoration was an antique Chinese lacquer screen. It was a classical, upright folding screen which stood more than two metres high, consisting of four incised red lacquer panels, each more than sixty centimetres across. The screen, which bore the title Four Virtuous Pursuits of the Chinese Literati, was ornamented with scenes of gardens in which groups of literati were engrossed in texts, recited poems, practised calligraphy or played the Chinese lute. This Chinese lacquer screen, the epitome of refinement, travelled around the world with my parents and always occupied a prominent place in the ambassadorial residences they occupied.

Robert van Gulik, born in Zutphen in 1910 and died in The Hague in 1967, studied Chinese at Leiden and Utrecht. He was awarded his doctorate at the age of twenty-four for a dissertation about a horse-headed Tantric deity in China and Japan, delving into the origins of this deity in India and Tibet. Afterwards he entered the service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague and was posted to China and Japan as a diplomat in the turbulent years around the Second World War. In this period he wrote his first Judge Dee novels. Judge Dee was a historical Chinese judge (magistrate) who had lived in the Tang dynasty (618–908). Robert van Gulik, who was an ardent reader of detective novels, discovered a small book about this celebrated judge and the murder cases he had solved by a Ming dynasty (1368–1644) author. He translated this book into English and wrote an introduction in which he explained the centuries old Chinese legal system and described the traditional Chinese crime novel. Robert van Gulik’s purpose in publishing this book about the original Judge Dee was to show the West that China had its own detective genre and its own Maigret or Sherlock Holmes, complete with a Watson figure.

Judge Dee also became Robert van Gulik’s personal hero because, encouraged by the many enthusiastic reactions to his translation, a year later he began to write his own Judge Dee mysteries. He brought the master detective of the Tang dynasty to life again in Judge Dee crime novels which were the product of his own imagination. He set his stories in seventeenth-century China, during the Ming dynasty, an era in which China underwent a cultural golden age. Although Dee had lived nearly a thousand years earlier, the Ming era gave the author more freedom of choice in the background to his stories. He also drew his illustrations in the original Chinese style of the Ming period. In the Judge Dee novels Robert van Gulik shared with the reader 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 rules of the western detective stories, this was the successful formula of the Judge Dee mysteries.

Robert van Gulik was a passionate collector of Chinese art and antiques. Wherever he happened to be in the world, he was acquainted with the Chinese antiquarians and art dealers and during his many quests it was not unusual for him to discover unique objects which he acquired for his collection. In 1949 in an antique-dealer’s in Tokyo he came across a beautiful Chinese lacquer screen which from that moment became one of his objets d’art and joined his library as an unalterable fixture among his household belongings. This lacquer screen was the inspiration behind Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee novel The Lacquer Screen. He wrote this novel in Kuala Lumpur where he posted as Dutch ambassador to Malaysia from 1959 to 1962. The Chinese lacquer screen stood in the drawing room of the residence.

In The Lacquer Screen, Judge Dee solves two complicated murder cases and in doing so uncovers the repulsive secret which lurked behind the four panels of an antique Chinese lacquer screen. The screen as it is described in the story matches the lacquer screen which stood in our house. However, in the Judge Dee mystery the panels on the lacquer screen have been accorded a different theme, they represent the four seasons which tallies better with the story.

In the Dutch embassy in Tokyo the Chinese lacquer screen stood in the hall at the entrance to the residence where my parents welcomed guests at official receptions. I have a photo which shows Robert van Gulik shaking the hand of Anton Geesink, the Olympic judo champion at the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964, in front of the Chinese lacquer screen. After Robert van Gulik’s death in 1967 — he died in office as Dutch ambassador in Tokyo — the lacquer screen moved to my mother’s house in The Hague. Afterwards it stood for a while in the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden and was also part of an exhibition in the Museum Naturalis in Leiden. In 2014 the lacquer screen was moved to the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing (Chungking), China, in which, in the Robert van Gulik Room, there is a permanent exhibition of the life and work of this Dutchman, in honour of the contribution he made to the introduction in the West of what was then relatively unknown China. After sixty-five years of peregrinations, the lacquer screen has returned to its country of origin.

As a schoolboy I often studied the lacquer screen, fascinated by the figures ingeniously incised out of the red lacquer of the panels framed in ebony. I was astonished that the screen had managed to survive so many long-distance moves unscathed. It had to be taken apart and packed into chests, loaded onto ships and then unloaded again. Closer inspection shows that there is some damage to one of the panels and it does seem that one of the tiny figures in the lacquer has been damaged, but Judge Dee will tell you more about this in The Lacquer Screen.