The Emperor’s Pearl

Underneath the name of the street on the small sign-board in Robert van Gulik Avenue in Zutphen is written, ‘R.H. van Gulik, Sinologist’. The street is called after the Dutch China expert, diplomat and writer who was born in Zutphen on the 9th of August 1910 and who won world fame with his Judge Dee novels. In ancient China, besides dispensing justice, Judge Dee was also mayor and chief of police responsible for carrying out criminal investigations. With the help of his four assistants, this astute judge solves the most complicated murder cases. Perhaps younger readers are acquainted with the Judge Dee novels only from the bookcases of their parents or grandparents. The complete series of these ‘classics’ of the crime fiction genre have been republished in Dutch in 2015 by Overamstel Publishers and have regularly been republished all over the world in many languages.

Robert van Gulik studied Sinology in Leiden and did his doctorate in Utrecht with a thesis about Hayagrīva, a Tantric horse-headed avatar of the god Vishnu revered in China and Japan. At the age of twenty-four he entered the Dutch diplomatic service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. As an expert on the Far East, in May 1935 he was given his first posting at the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, in the turbulent period presaging the outbreak of the Second World War in that region. In an antiquarian bookshop in Tokyo he chanced upon a small Chinese book dating from the eighteenth century. Its hero was a legendary Chinese judge, Tie (Di Renjie). This bundle of stories describes how the judge and master detective Dee, who lived in the Tang Dynasty (618-908), solved three complicated murder cases.

Robert van Gulik, himself a devotee of detective stories, translated this original Chinese crime novel into English. In 1949 he published a limited edition of twelve hundred signed copies of his translation (Dee Goong An; Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee). In the Foreword to this book, he sets out all the characteristics of the classic Chinese detective novel and he explains the centuries old Chinese legal system, with a full explanation of the corporal punishments and the forms of the death penalty which the condemned person might be forced to endure. The purpose of Van Gulik’s translation was to show people in the West that China had its own detective genre, and in its own popular hero, Judge Dee, and with him also had its own Maigret or Sherlock Holmes. This book about the historical Judge Dee was published in 1976 as Celebrated cases of Judge Dee (Dover publicatoons, New York).

Judge Dee also became Robert van Gulik’s hero because, spurred on by the many enthusiastic reactions to his translation, he conceived the idea of writing new stories in which this astute judge would be the central figure. In his own Judge Dee books he breathed new life into the master detective of the Tang dynasty. He actually moved his own stories to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644); a period in which the cultural and artistic life in China had reached a zenith. He also provided his novels with self-drawn illustrations in the classical Chinese style of the Ming dynasty. The portrait of Judge Dee in his judge’s cap and long beard has become the logo of the Judge Dee crime stories.

As a sinologist Robert van Gulik had an extensive knowledge of Chinese culture and history but he still did extra research for his Judge Dee novels. This is what imbues the Judge Dee mysteries with an authentic Chinese atmosphere. It gives them a basis in facts and provides original descriptions of Chinese society in the seventeenth century. For instance, in passing we learn (in Murder in Canton) that the Chinese at that time brushed their teeth with a piece of liquorice root whose ends had been teased apart. Because of his interest in Judge Dee and Chinese criminal law, Robert van Gulik was able to trace a thirteenth-century Chinese manual for magistrates/judges which he translated into English (Parallel Cases from under the Pear-Tree, Leiden, 1956). He used a number of the original crimes described in this book as plots in his own Judge Dee books, as he explains in his Postscript. His diplomatic work took him not only to countries in the Far East, he was also posted to Africa, the United States, India and the Middle East. Everything he saw and experienced there became a continuous source of inspiration for the plots of his Judge Dee novels.

Between 1940 and 1967, Robert van Gulik wrote sixteen Judge Dee mysteries. Judge Dee’s first posting was to Peng-lai from where he was transferred to Han-yuan. After two years he was moved to Poo-yang and after that to the small city of Lan-fang. The Judge Dee series has been published over the whole world in twenty-nine languages and has sold millions of copies. A review of all Dutch and international publications of the Judge Dee mysteries can be found on this website.

My father was always very closely involved in the publication of his books. He gave his publishers advice about form and lay-out. He often designed the covers himself. He would write a Judge Dee novel in two to three months, but his publisher in London did not want to put more than two titles a year on the English market. That was not fast enough for Van Gulik and, while he was Dutch ambassador in Kuala Lumpur, he privately published three Judge Dee books written in English at his own expense. He had come across an enterprising local printer, Art Printing Works, which hitherto only had experience in printing cinema tickets and brochures. In collaboration with this printer, he designed the covers, decided on the lay-out and even the font used in the books. These ‘first’ editions were a great success in the international market in Southeast Asia and are now collector’s items. He was also creatively involved in the Judge Dee comic books and, in collaboration with the illustrator Fritz Kloezeman, he published a number of comic books (Loeb, Boumaar) in Dutch or they also appeared as series in various Dutch daily newspapers.

Van Gulik found writing, drawing illustrations and working with publishers on the lay-out of his books relaxing, a distraction from his diplomatic work and academic research. In his autobiographical notes he wrote that working on his Judge Dee novels had become an essential part of his life, as necessary to him as his academic research. Without the latter, he could not have persisted in his diplomatic career which dealt with purely mundane matters. As a researcher he was a slave to facts and forced to rein in his imagination. However, as the author of a Judge Dee story, he was the undisputed master of the facts and could allow his fantasy full rein.

My father wrote the majority of the Judge Dee novels in the period in which he was ambassador in Beirut, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, his last posting. I spent a large portion of my youth with Judge Dee. I remember my father being constantly busy with his novels, although he did not always talk about them. He could come up with an idea anywhere, inspired by a person, a building or an object. He would note it down on small cards which he kept in a box. How he managed it I shall never know, but if we visited a Chinese temple he was always received by the highest-ranking abbot. This could be an obese man with a bald head and large, bulging eyes clad in a saffron-coloured robe, like the monk in Poets and Murder or the abbot of the Buddhist temple in The Chinese Bell Murders.

I have read and reread my father’s books at various periods in my life and I have discovered more and more in them. Although at home we never followed any particular religion, my father had unquestionably been influenced by his profound knowledge of Eastern religions. On occasion, albeit not often, in some chance remark he would show his spiritual side. In his books his brainchild Judge Dee says that, although there is an explanation for most supernatural happenings, the existence of these forces is undeniable. In the old Chinese crime literature, supernatural happenings were actually a popular element. In fact, as a high-ranking official in ancient China, Judge Dee was a staunch disciple of Confucianism, the state religion based on a system of moral rules of conduct. Judge Dee wanted nothing to do with Buddhism, which he considered an aberration imported from the barbarian West (in this case meaning Tibet). He did have some respect for Taoism, with its mystical experiences, rich symbolism and services involving magic. Janwillem van de Wetering has described these backgrounds splendidly in his Dutch introductions to the Judge Dee series published by Elsevier and I agree with him that my father felt most drawn to the philosophy of Zen Buddhism (‘Zen is not a desire for knowledge as it desires nothing’, says Van de Wetering). The books read like psychological thrillers and precisely because the stories take place in a distant past in a culture unknown in the West, the Judge Dee novels are timeless.

The Emperor’s Pearl is set in Poo-yang where Judge Dee had been appointed district magistrate after his term of office in Han-yuan. The main persons involved in the cruel murder of a young woman are an antique dealer and a collector of antiques. My father, himself an avid collector of Chinese art and antiques, was well versed in this world and visited Chinese antique dealers wherever he happened to be. He once told the story of how in an antique shop in Seoul, he came across a medium-sized, wooden seated Buddha that had been gilded with gold-leaf when he was travelling from Korea to Tokyo, where he was working at the Dutch embassy. The two separate, black-painted wooden hands fitted into the cavities in each arm. He packed the Buddha in newspaper and placed it on the seat next to him in the aircraft on which he flew back to Tokyo. A number of American soldiers happened to be on the plane and, in an unguarded moment, as a joke they put a cap on the Buddha’s head and a stuck a pipe through the newspaper into his mouth. Suddenly the plane ran into turbulence and the pilot had to struggle to get it under control. The wrath of Buddha had been aroused, my father explained to his fellow-passengers, and to appease him he got rid of the pipe and the cap, after which the weather calmed down and the plane reached its destination safely.

The Buddha, which stood on a Chinese ebony altar, was one of the permanent fixtures in my father’s library. He presided over the study, his lips folded into a faint, serene smile, like that of the River Goddess in the small temple in Poo-yang in The Emperor’s Pearl. I would sometimes do my homework in my father’s study, lying on a large blue carpet woven with a pattern of five-clawed dragons, the symbol of the Chinese emperor which could only be displayed in an imperial palace. The carpet had once lain in one of rooms in the palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Gazing up at the gilded Buddha image, I used to think about the Buddha’s separate hands and wonder into which position they had been turned. In The Emperor’s Pearl, Judge Dee solves the old mystery of a rare pearl which had once disappeared from an imperial palace with the help of a loose hand of an image of the Buddha — precisely like the Buddha of my youth.