The Phantom of the Temple

Behind every successful man there is a strong woman. Judge Dee had three, as was the custom for a man of his stature in his era in China. In fact, even with his three wives Judge Dee was a moderate man; his colleague Lo, the district magistrate of Chin-hwa, who embraced a more hedonistic lifestyle, stopped at eight (see Poets and Murder). Although Robert van Gulik does mention Judge Dee’s wives regularly in his novels, he does not say much about their lives. They kept to the womens’ quarters, which were strictly out of bounds to the male personnel of the court with the exception of Sergeant Hoong. At the request of his readers who wrote to him saying they would very much like to know more about Judge Dee and his domestic life, especially his wives, he gives us in The Phantom of the Temple, the chance to become better acquainted with Judge Dee’s wives. His first lady, the oldest daughter of a high-ranking official who was his father’s best friend, ran the household. His second wife took care of the domestic expenses and his third wife employed her time painting and practicing calligraphy as well as supervising the children’s education. The illustration drawn by Van Gulik himself in the Ming style in chapter 8 (The birthday dinner) shows us a domestic scene of the Dee family enjoying a festive meal in the living-quarters of the courthouse in Lan-fang.

Besides being a diplomat and writer, Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) was also a scholar of Chinese, and he based his Judge Dee stories on solid research and facts about life in China during the Tang dynasty (618–908), the era in which Judge Dee lived. At that time, it was usual for gentlemen of standing to have a number of concubines. Furthermore, as we read in his novels, in all levels of society there was a flourishing culture of prostitution and brothel- keepers were organized in guilds. Prostitutes could be bought out to become a wife or concubine in a household. We witness this colourful facet of Chinese society in that period in the adventures of Dee’s assistant Ma Joong in the red-light quarter of Lan-fang.

Judge Dee (Di Renjie, 630–700 AD) was a historical Chinese magistrate who was famous for his perspicacity. Robert van Gulik discovered this legendary law-maker in a small eighteenth-century book recounting the famous murders which Judge Dee had solved. He translated the book into English and furnished it with an introduction in which he explains the centuries-old Chinese legal system as well as giving a description of the traditional Chinese crime novel. By producing this publication about the original Judge Dee (see Dee Goong An, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee), Robert van Gulik wanted to show the West that China had its own detective genre, and its own Maigret or Sherlock Holmes, even complemented by a Watson figure. The historical Judge Dee was the magistrate of a district, the smallest unit in the Chinese administrative structure. Besides acting as judge, he was also the mayor and, as head of the police, in charge of criminal investigations.

Encouraged by the many enthusiastic reactions his translation elicited, Robert van Gulik, a fervent fan of detective stories, decided to bring the master detective of the Tang dynasty back to life in a number of Judge Dee crime novels which were his own invention. He set his stories against the background of China as it was under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), an era of enormous cultural creativity. Although it is true that the historical Judge Dee had lived a thousand years earlier, the Ming dynasty offered the author more freedom in the choice of the backgrounds to his stories. In his Judge Dee stories, he combines his extensive knowledge of ancient Chinese culture and society with an ingenious plot in an authentic Chinese atmosphere.

Robert van Gulik studied Sinology in Leiden and obtained his doctorate in Utrecht at the age of twenty-four with a thesis about Hayagrīva, a horse-headed deity in Tantric Buddhism in China and Japan. In 1935 he entered the service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. After his first posting to the Dutch embassy in Tokyo and a special mission as a secret agent in Africa, in 1943 he was sent to Chongqing (Chungking) as a China specialist, the war- time capital of China, where the Dutch embassy was located during the Japanese occupation. During the war, the Chinese literary and artistic elite poured into this city, situated at the confluence where Jialing joins the Yangtze River which then flows on into the East China Sea. Van Gulik, who spoke and wrote fluent Chinese, was welcomed into the circles of Chinese scholars as an equal and took part in their many gatherings and discussions. He had developed his own cursive style of writing Chinese characters, a calligraphy which was well known and recognized everywhere as that of ‘Gao Luopei’, Robert van Gulik’s Chinese name. He learned to play the seven-stringed Chinese lute, an instrument which was the preserve of the elite in China. A large proportion of his academic work as a sinologist had its origins in this extremely fruitful period in Chongqing. In the West, where Robert van Gulik later found fame as a Dutch sinologist who knew more about Chinese literature and culture than did the Chinese themselves, he was thought to be the reincarnation of a Chinese mandarin and hence earned the nickname ‘the Dutch mandarin’.

It was also in this period in Chongqing that Robert van Gulik was introduced to a young Chinese lady, Miss Shui, at a reception at the British embassy. Her first name was Shih-fang, Chinese for ‘sweet scent’. They fell in love and married in Chongqing in 1943. My mother, a sociology student at the University of Beijing, had fled to Chongqing with a number of her fellow students after the Japanese occupation. Her father had been a high-ranking civil servant during the Qing, the last imperial dynasty in China. He had been posted to Paris and Berlin as a diplomat and was later sent to Russia as Chinese envoy. There is a story that he travelled from Beijing to Leningrad in a specially appointed train consisting of twenty carriages, in which the household personnel, including twenty-five kitchen staff, needed to run his new posting was also accommodated. As a scion of an old Beijing mandarin family, Mr Shui was regarded as the last mandarin known in China. We have photos of my mother’s father in a gold brocade gown, the ancient robes of office of a high-ranking official, such as Judge Dee himself might have worn during a sitting. At home they ate with silver chopsticks because — you never can tell — if the food was poisoned, the silver would immediately turn black.

My parents very nearly couldn’t get married. The problem was that, for the wedding to proceed, they needed the permission of Shih-fang’s father, but he was unreachable in occupied Bejing. The only representative of Shih-fang’s family in Chongqing was an uncle who was fiercely opposed to the proposed marriage. He found it impossible to approve of a woman from a traditional Chinese family marrying ‘a foreign devil’. At this point, my father’s connections with the Chinese secret service came in handy. A message was smuggled along the Japanese lines to Shih-fang’s father in Beijing. He immediately gave his consent to the marriage, as his attitude to the West was open not only because of his travels in Europe. In this respect, Judge Dee’s three wives had it easier.