A man of many privileges

Robert van Gulik spends his primary school years in Batavia, where he writes a systematic description of wayang kulit at the age of 11. Upon his return to Holland he is not only surprised by his schoolmates’ restrained attitude towards fighting and sex, but also keeps reading about Javanese history and language. In school he enjoys studying languages, and starts to study Chinese, Sanskrit and Russian in his spare time from the retired professor Uhlenbeck in Nijmegen. When he helps out the professor with his Blackfoot – English dictionary, his name appears as one of the authors when the book is published. Van Gulik will continue learning languages all his life, but first studies Chinese, Japanese and some Tibetan in Leiden. His 18-year-older girlfriend introduces him the art world. Van Gulik publishes regularly about Asian art. At 24 he gets his cum laude doctorate in Utrecht with a thesis about the horse cult in ancient China. He also lands a job as a translator in the Dutch foreign service. His girlfriend fears the age difference, and dumps him when he boards the train to Tokyo.

At the time in 1935 the militarisation of Japan has just started, and the Dutch receive their first threats about oil and commodity delivery to Japan from the Dutch East Indies. During his career however van Gulik would always try to reduce his working hours (often to 4 hours per day) in favour of his studies. In Tokyo he studies modern Japanese and Chinese and the art history of these countries, but soon feels that he can handle only one country: China. His first longer-term girlfriend (of 3 months, van Gulik considers sex “a sport”) teaches him about the stress and emotional pressure of westernisation. Van Gulik learns most about Japanese life from his second (7 years) live-in girlfriend, who presented herself as "the servant that enjoys her master's favours", “the first lady that ruled the inside (nei-jen).” Very soon he is considered like a Chinese in diplomatic circles, a man who thinks like an Oriental. He has a “satori-experience” around the new year when he feels the transience of Buddhism, and starts experiencing the East from the inside out. His ideal for himself is to combine the life of a scientist and a civil servant in the Chinese style. He also picks up lute playing and calligraphy. Privately, he states he is so spoilt by the East that he could never again conclude a marriage in which love and friendship play an important role.

Many right-wing Japanese are sinophiles, and his knowledge of Chinese history gains him friends among them. Van Gulik uses these relations in his political reports back to The Hague. Van Gulik made weekly trips to bookstores to find books about China. He publishes regularly for the various Asian societies. When the war comes near he moves his library to Tanjung Priok where it later gets lost in a bombardment. Van Gulik also tries to get 3 months sick leave to travel to Batavia. Why he wants that is unclear, but if he had received it, it would have led to 4 years of interment in a Japanese concentration camp: it was a grave misjudgement of the military situation. After the declaration of war, the Allied diplomatic community is isolated until they are shipped to Africa. Only outside the country do they hear about Japan’s military successes.

Van Gulik now does some odd stints, like spying on an Egyptian princess for the British, and advising Peter Flemming on psychological warfare for against the Japanese.

Van Gulik is then assigned to the Dutch embassy in Chongqing, the provisional capital of the Kuomintang government. As such it is also a centre of the arts and sciences with little other entertainment. Here he also meets his wife; China's minister of foreign affairs and the wife of China's foreign intelligence service are witnesses at the wedding. Van Gulik and his colleagues are fascinated by classical china, which they still in and around Chongqing in an unadulterated form. With their classicist background they have little interest in and subsequently underestimate the communists. The importance of family ties, personal property and regionalism would be too strong for communism, they claim. He is equally conservative when it comes to Dutch colonialism in the Indies.

After the war van Gulik is repatriated and continues his rise through the ranks of the Dutch foreign service. He keeps on limiting his working hours and makes good use of the various other privileges it brings (the new Dutch minister of foreign affairs recently called diplomacy a “quaint pastime”, and this book seems to confirm that). Van Gulik translates antique Judge Dee stories, and starts soon writing his own, while also continuing with his scientific publications and his weekly trips to antique stores and book shops. His Japanese publisher only wants to publish his Judge Dee stories with a nude on the cover. If van Gulik objects that China has no history of erotic art, the publisher tells him to look harder. This would eventually lead to his most famous scholarly work. The chain smoking van Gulik (60 cigarettes a day) would die of lung cancer while ambassador to Japan.

The title of the book refers to the three different roles van Gulik played in his professional life as a diplomat, writer and scholar. However, it could also refer to his capability to respond like a Dutchman as much as a Chinese or a Japanese. Even his wife was surprised (and shocked) to see the changes in her husband’s behaviour when he became ambassador to Japan.

This biography of Robert van Gulik is a combination of van Gulik’s autobiographical notes, his agendas, and interviews and memories of the people who knew him. Both authors have known their subject personally. Carl Barkman, who wrote most of this book, worked under van Gulik in the Dutch embassy in Chongqing, and Helena de Vries had met him in Japan. This proximity is not only an advantage. Not only do they claim that van Gulik was a genius on the first page of the book, their diplomatic background also leads to an endless list of names of fellow diplomats, including their academic and noble ranks. Still, on the whole it is an enjoyable, easy read. ( )