A fascinating world opens, in far-off places

First of all, van Gulik was born in Zutphen, The Netherlands, in 1910. His father was a medical officer and travelled in the Dutch colonies (Indonesia), where Robert grew up and was tutored in Mandarin. He joined the Dutch Foreign Service in 1935 and was stationed in various countries: Japan, China, India and Lebanon during the civil war of 1958. From 1965 until his death of cancer in 1967 he was Ambassador to Japan and the Republic of Korea.

In his younger days the staging of Javanese shadow plays (wayang) brought him great joy. He loved framing Chinese pictorial art and mounting calligraphy scrolls. He raised gibbons and wrote a study of this ape that lived widely across China during recent centuries.

Van Gulik also wrote two books on the Chinese pipa, or lute, a four-stringed instrument with a pear-shaped wooden body. He was an avid collector of objects regardless of their price or condition, prizing them for their historical, cultural or scientific value.

Today he is remembered as a highly educated orientalist, scholar, diplomat, linguist, calligrapher and guqin player (a Chinese zither) as well as a writer. An interesting person indeed, who loved to delve into his surroundings.

It was while looking around an old shop in Tokyo that he found an ageing copy of an 18th-century Chinese detective novel “Di Gong An”, or “Dee Goong An”, by an anonymous author credited as “Buti zhuanren”. This contained gong’an stories, a subgenre of Chinese crime fiction involving government magistrates who solve criminal cases.

The tales were loosely based on the adventures of a historical figure, the Confucian magistrate Judge Ti, or Di, or Dee. This real personage was Di Renjie, or Dee Jen-djieh, a county magistrate and statesman in the Tang Dynasty that ruled from AD 618 to 907, with an interregnum between 690 and 705. Di Renjie lived from 630-700.

Van Gulik decided to translate them and in Malaya he teamed up with a Chinese printer to produce “Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee” in 1949, after which he decided to borrow the protagonist Dee and create his own fictional works based on the character. Thus was born the series of 16 historical mysteries that stretched from 1959 to 1966.

“The Chinese Gold Murders” is the second one in the series (or the first, depending on how you look at it), from 1959. This latest reissue in 2024 comes from Penguin Random House in their Crime & Espionage titles, and as no translator is named we assume that the Dutch author who learned Mandarin wrote in English.

“The Chinese Gold Murders” sees Judge Dee take the job of magistrate at the lonely but growing port town of Peng-lai, on the north-east seacoast of Shantung Province, where the last occupant of his post was discovered poisoned in his library, with the doors and windows locked, his papers missing. Two friends try to persuade him not to go – who would want to step into the shoes of a dead man?

This volume shows us a young-ish Judge Dee, in his early 30s, fresh out of finishing his exams for entrance into the bureaucracy and eager to begin his career with his first posting as a magistrate in the provinces. Unlike the friends, who prefer the more comfortable life allowed by remaining a government secretary in the capital, Dee is a man who hungers for experiences of the “real” world after a lifetime of study and purely theoretical pursuits.

He is looking forward to getting out of the Chinese Metropolitan Court of Justice, tired of only seeing cases on paper, processing routine documents and copies. So he requested the recently vacated position, no matter that the district of Peng-lai is far from the capital. He is excited: “Now he said eagerly, ’think of it, a mysterious murder to solve, right after one has arrived at one’s post! To have an opportunity right away for getting rid of dry-as-dust theorising and paper work! At last I’ll be dealing with men, my friends, real living men!’ ”

He especially wants to dive into the realm of criminal prosecution and get his hands dirty by working on actual cases. Little does he know that his wish will soon become stark reality.

Peng-lai is full of temples, taverns, restaurants, shops, flower boats and floating river brothels on barges outside the city’s gates. There are farms and villages for kilometres around, a monastery and a deserted temple. He has a staff of 40, with assistants, constables, guards, scribes and runners. Dee travels by horse and palanquin.

But how was magistrate Wang murdered in a closed room by poisoned tea that he made himself? Why does a newlywed bride Mrs. Koo, given by her bibliophile father to an older man she dislikes, disappear? Then Fan Choong , chief clerk at the tribunal, is butchered and his unknown lady friend’s body can’t be discovered. And the man-eating tiger?

There are rumours of smuggling from boats, but smuggling what? The mysterious Korean Quarter, reached by the Rainbow Bridge over a creek, is pretty much off limits to the authorities, plus there are strange monks and supernatural beings that can’t be denied by Judge Dee because he sees them with his own eyes…

One can detect a similar urge to live life by Robert van Gulik and his Judge Dee. The author wrote this mystery in plain and simple style, and presumably the other books are without flowery embellishment too. If you find it difficult to remember your Koo Meng-pin from your Tsao Ho-hsien or your Pei Soo-niang, the paperback has a list of Dramatis Personae to assist.

Also there is a sketch map of Peng-lai to find your bearings, and the multi-talented van Gulik has contributed 10 illustrations drawn by himself in the Chinese style to complement the text. A Preface and a Postscript provide further orientation of these medieval times in far-off places.

Readers are immersed in the Pavilion of Joy and Sadness, the Nine Flowers Orchard restaurant and the White Cloud Temple amid lacquer trees and lampions. Beards and pigtails are the fashion and robes have wide sleeves to carry round those necessary objects. White is the colour of mourning and miscreants get a good whipping. A raped daughter cannot be taken back by her father because she “has offended against our sacred moral codes”.

“The Chinese Gold Murders” may well entice readers to seek out more Judge Dee. Van Gulik offers guidance. At that time the T’ang Emperor Kao-tsung (AD 649-83) had just succeeded in establishing Chinese suzerainty over the greater part of Korea. According to the chronology of Judge Dee mysteries, Dee arrived in Peng-lai in the summer of 663, then in 666 was transferred to Hanyuan (see “The Chinese Lake Murders”, 1960), and thence in 668 to Poo-yang in Kiangsu Province (see “The Chinese Bell Murders”, 1958).

In 607 he was appointed to the magistracy of Lan-fang, on the western frontier (see “The Chinese Maze Murders”, 1951) where he stayed five years. In 676 he was transferred to Pei-chow in the far north, and solved his last three cases as district magistrate (see “The Chinese Nail Murders”, 1961). In the same year he was appointed President of the Metropolitan Court of Justice, in the Imperial Capital. Judge Dee is/was a cluey fellow.

A fascinating world opens, courtesy the fascinating Robert van Gulik.