The Red Pavilion

A Man of Three lives is the title of the Dutch biography of Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) underlining the three strands of his life — sinologist, diplomat and writer. This biography was written by Leentje de Vries-van der Hoeven and Carl Barkman, both sinologists whom he knew well from the Dutch diplomatic service and with whom he became good friends.

After attending secondary school at the Municipal Grammar School in Nijmegen, Robert van Gulik studied Oriental languages at the University of Leiden and became a sinologist. At the age of twenty-four, he did his doctorate at the University of Utrecht with a thesis about Hayagrīva, a horse-headed Tantric deity in China and Japan. He has left an extensive scientific oeuvre, which includes books about extremely diverse topics like Chinese ink-stones, the seven-stringed Chinese lute and Chinese paintings, his magnum opus. As a sinologist his publications brought him international fame; just recently once again in China where a Chinese translation of his biography has been published. His scientific library which contains an exceptional collection of Chinese books is now housed in the Robert van Gulik Room in the library of Leiden University. In 2014 this room was visited by a camera team from the Chinese station CCTV who were making a documentary about the sinologists around the world who have made the greatest contributions to knowledge about China and its ancient culture in the West.

Robert van Gulik commenced his career as a diplomat in 1935 after he had been accepted for overseas duties by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. His first posting was to the Dutch embassy in Tokyo where he worked in the fraught years before the outbreak of the Second World War in the Far East. After his secondment to the British Intelligence Service for which he worked as a secret agent, he was posted to Chongqing (Chungking) in 1943, the wartime capital of China, where the Dutch embassy was stationed during the Japanese occupation of Beijing. There he married Shih-fang Shui, the daughter of a Chinese diplomat from an old mandarin family who had held posts in the Chinese embassies in Paris, Berlin and Leningrad under the last imperial dynasty (see the introduction to The Phantom of the Temple). After Chongqing the Van Guliks travelled the world as Robert van Gulik fulfilled various posts in the United States, India, the Middle East, Malaysia, Japan and Korea, with intervals of time spent in The Hague. He died en poste as Dutch ambassador in Tokyo, the same embassy in which he had begun his diplomatic career as second secretary in 1935.

As a writer, Robert van Gulik has won his greatest fame for his Judge Dee detective novels. Judge Dee (Di Renjie) was a historical Chinese judge who lived in the Tang dynasty (618–908). Robert van Gulik, who was himself an inveterate reader of detective novels, happened to find a small book by an eighteenth-century Chinese author about the famous judge and the murder cases he had solved. He translated this book into English and wrote an introduction in which he explains the ancient Chinese legal system and describes the traditional Chinese crime novel. By translating this publication about the original Judge Dee, Robert van Gulik wanted to show the West that China had its own detective genre and its own Maigret and Sherlock Holmes, complete with his Watson character.

Encouraged by the many enthusiastic reactions to his translation, Robert van Gulik brought the master detective of the Tang dynasty back to live in Judge Dee crime novels he wrote himself. He set these stories against the background of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a period in which the cultural and artistic life in China attained great heights. This gave him a greater range of possibilities to create the setting of his own stories and he drew the illustrations himself in the Ming style. In his Judge Dee mysteries, Van Gulik combined his own extensive knowledge of ancient Chinese culture and society with an ingenious plot in an authentic Chinese atmosphere. Between 1950 and 1967, he published sixteen Judge Dee mysteries, which have appeared over the whole world translated into twenty-nine languages. The whole series has recently been published in Chinese, so that the people in China can enjoy new stories about their world famous Judge Dee.

Robert van Gulik’s three lives as sinologist, diplomat and writer of detective novels were closely bound up together. His knowledge of ancient Chinese culture and crime literature and the periods he spent in the Far East provided him with a constant source of inspiration for his Judge Dee novels which he wrote as a form of recreation alongside his duties as a diplomat. The element which linked his three lives was undeniably a fascination for China and the various cultures of the Far East. Where did this fascination of this Dutchman born in Zutphen come from?

Robert van Gulik spent part of his childhood in what were then the Netherlands East Indies. His father was a doctor attached to the Royal Dutch East Indies Army as a medical officer. In 1915 he was posted to Batavia (now Jakarta), where the Van Gulik family spent several years. Robert attended primary school, enjoyed the out-door life-style and the absolute menagerie of animals which they kept about the house. He quickly found himself fascinated by the Chinese characters which he saw on the sign-boards and scroll-paintings in the Chinese quarter as well as in the mysterious Chinese temples with their large incense-burners and statues of deities. He would copy the Chinese characters in the sand with a twig and kindly passers-by would explain their meaning. This laid the foundations for a life-long love-affair with what was to him a still mysterious China. As a school-boy he also developed a passion for Wayang, the centuries-old Javanese shadow theatre. He collected the puppets and at the age of ten he wrote a long essay on folio-sized paper about the gods who were brought to life in the Wayang. He illustrated this book with meticulously drawn plates of the various Wayang heroes whose praises were sung in the time-honoured stories. In the Foreword he wrote: “Everything noted in this book is completely true.”

Robert van Gulik continued to honour this motto in his later life and it is also true of many of the elements in the Judge Dee detective novels he wrote himself, with the exception of the incidents in the plots he had devised himself. His description of the ancient Chinese legal system along with the jurisdiction invested in and the restrictions placed on a judge-magistrate in the Tang dynasty was based on thorough literature research. He studied reports of the corporal punishments meted out to suspects during their interrogation in the court; a suspect could be sentenced only if he or she had confessed their guilt. The contacts between Judge Dee and his assistants and with people from all layers of Chinese society give a faithful picture of urban life in ancient China. In The Red Pavilion, which takes place on Paradise Island on which gambling casinos and prostitution ruled the roost, Judge Dee’s path is crossed by the Flower Queen, the courtesan of the year, chosen for her beauty and artistic talent. We read, perhaps with some surprise, that in the Tang dynasty prostitution was regulated by a system of registered brothels and legal requirements which had to be obeyed by brothel-keepers. The courtesans and prostitutes were divided into various ranks according to their reputation and training, but only the Flower Queen – a minor detail – had the right to refuse a client, however eminent he might have been. An extensive explanation of this culture of prostitution can be found in the standard work on the sexual life in ancient China written by Van Gulik (Sexual Life in Ancient China, Brill, Leiden, 1961).

Robert van Gulik also had a fourth life as husband of Shih-fang and father of four children. He wrote most of the Judge Dee novels in the periods in which he was ambassador in Beirut, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo once again. According to his own notes, he wrote The Red Pavilion in Kuala Lumpur in exactly one month, from 22 March to 22 April 1959. It was followed by The Emperor’s Pearl and Murder in Canton, both also written in Kuala Lumpur. In that period I was living at home with my parents and my sister Pauline. We children attended the international primary school. Our two brothers, Willem and Pieter, were at boarding school in the Netherlands and only came home for the long holidays. We lived in a residential area in a house surrounded by a tropical garden in which our family friend, the gibbon, had his own tree (see the introduction to The Monkey and the Tiger). My father was constantly busy with his diplomatic work, his academic research and, of course, his Judge Dee novels. Despite all this he had plenty of time for us and our friends. We used to meet each other regularly after school time at the open-air swimming pool at the Lake Club in the afternoon and in the evenings we often went to the cinema, usually a horror film, or to a Chinese theatre with plenty of spectacle on display. A significant section of the Malaysian population was, and still is, Chinese and Kuala Lumpur is scattered with Chinese temples, innumerable Chinese shops, restaurants and theatres. This Chinese environment was an ideal source of inspiration for the adventures of Judge Dee. Sometimes my sister and I would accompany my parents to have dinner with Chinese friends of theirs; dinners which I seem to remember were endless. One dish after another was brought to the table, just as in the dinners Judge Dee attended. When we reached home we went to sleep, but my father went to his study. A young woman had been found dead in the Red Pavilion. The only sound was then the rattling of his type-writer.