Robert van Gulik
| Robert van Gulik | |
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Robert van Gulik with a baby gibbon Bubu
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| Born |
August 9, 1910 Zutphen |
| Died |
September 24, 1967 The Hague |
| Spouse(s) | Shui Shifang |
| Signature | |
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Robert Hans van Gulik (Chinese: 髙羅佩; pinyin: Gāo Luópèi, August 9, 1910 – September 24, 1967) was an orientalist, diplomat, musician (of the guqin), and writer, best known for the Judge Dee historical mysteries, the protagonist of which he borrowed from the 18th-century Chinese detective novel Dee Goong An.
Robert van Gulik was born in Zutphen, the son of a medical officer in the Dutch army of what was then called the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). He was born in the Netherlands, but from the age of three till twelve he lived in Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta), where he was tutored in Mandarin and other languages. He went to Leiden University in 1934 and obtained his PhD in 1935. His talents as a linguist suited him for a job in the Dutch Foreign Service, which he joined in 1935; and he was then stationed in various countries, mostly in East Asia (Japan and China).
He was in Tokyo when Japan declared war on the Netherlands in 1941, but he, along with the rest of the Allied diplomatic staff, was evacuated in 1942. He spent most of the rest of World War II as the secretary for the Dutch mission to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government in Chongqing. While in Chongqing, he married a Chinese woman, Shui Shifang, the daughter of a Qing dynasty Imperial mandarin, and they had four children together.
After the war ended, he returned to the Netherlands, then went to the United States as the counsellor of the Dutch Embassy in Washington D.C. He returned to Japan in 1949 and stayed there for the next four years. While in Tokyo, he published his first two books, the translation Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee and a privately published book of erotic colored prints from the Ming dynasty. Later postings took him all over the world, from New Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, and Beirut (during the 1958 Civil War) to The Hague. In 1959 Van Gulik became correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, he resigned in 1963. In 1964 he became a full member, and the next year he became a foreign member. From 1965 until his death from cancer at The Hague in 1967, he was the Dutch ambassador to Japan.
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