Van Gulik was the son of a medical officer in the Dutch army of what was then called the Dutch East Indies . He was born in the Netherlands but from the age of three till twelve he lived in Batavia where he was tutored in and other languages. He went to the University of Leyden in 1934 and obtained his Ph.D 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 .
He was in Tokyo when Japan declared war on the Netherlands in 1941 but he, and the rest of the Allied diplomatic staff, were 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 , the daughter of an Imperial mandarin . Together they had four children.
After the war ended, he returned to the Netherlands then went to the United States as the Councillor 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, ''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, Beirut to The Hague. From 1965 until his early death from cancer in 1967 he was the Dutch ambassador to Japan.
The Judge Dee mysteries
''See also the article on the Judge Dee series''
During World War II Robert van Gulik translated the 18th century detective novel ''Dee Goong An'' into English under the title ''Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee'' . The main character of this book, Judge Dee, was based on the real statesman and detective Di Renjie who lived in the seventh century during the Tang Dynasty , though in the novel itself elements of Ming Dynasty China were mixed in.
Thanks to his translation of this largely forgotten work, van Gulik became interested in Chinese detective fiction and he decided to attempt one himself. His first attempt, ''The Chinese Bell Murders'', was written from 1948-1950 and "borrowed" Judge Dee and his assistants from ''Dee Goong An''.
His intent in writing this first Judge Dee novel was, as he wrote in remarks on ''The Chinese Bell Murders'', "to show modern Chinese and Japanese writers that their own ancient crime-literature has plenty of source material for detective and mystery-stories"
Van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries follow the long tradition of Chinese Detective fiction, intentionally preserving a number of key elements of that writing culture. Most notably he had Judge Dee solve three different cases, a traditional device in Chinese mysteries.
The whodunit element is also less important in the Judge Dee stories than it is in the traditional Western detective story, though still more so than in traditional Chinese detective stories.
Other works
Robert van Gulik studied ''Indisch Recht'' and ''Indologie'' at Leiden University from 1929 until 1934, receiving his doctorate for a dissertation on the horse cult in Northeast Asia. Though he made his career in the Netherlands diplomatic service, he kept up his studies. During his life he wrote twenty-odd essays and monographs on various subjects, mainly but not exclusively on aspects of Chinese culture. Typically, much of his scholarly work was first published outside of the Netherlands.
In his lifetime Van Gulik was recognized as a European expert on Imperial Chinese jurisprudence.
Bibliography
Judge Dee
The author, having finished the translation of the story ''Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee'' around 1948, included an essay on the largely forgotten ''genre'' of Chinese detective stories. He suggested in his afterword that it was easy to imagine re-writing some of the old Chinese case histories with an eye towards ''modern'' readers. Not long after he published ''Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee'', van Gulik himself tried his hand at creating a detective story based on some older Chinese case histories. This became the book The Chinese Maze Murders . As van Gulik thought the story would have more interest to Japanese and Chinese readers, he had it translated into Japanese by a friend and it was sold in Japan under the title "Meiro-no-satsujin". With the success of the book, van Gulik embarked on translating the book into Chinese. The translation was published by a Singapore book publisher in 1953. The reviews were good and van Gulik wrote two more books over the next few years, also with an eye towards Japanese and then Chinese editions.
After all this work was done, van Gulik found a publisher for English language versions of these stories and the first English language book was published in 1957. Later books were written and published in English first, the translations came afterwards.
The Judge Dee Mysteries in the order in which they were written
*''Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee''
*''The Chinese Maze Murders''
*''The Chinese Bell Murders''
*''The Chinese Lake Murders''
*''The Chinese Gold Murders''
*''The Chinese Nail Murders''
*''The Haunted Monastery''
*''The Emperor's Pearl''
*''The Lacquer Screen''
*''The Red Pavilion''
*''The Monkey and the Tiger'', short stories
*''The Willow Pattern ''
*''Murder in Canton''
*''The Phantom of the Temple''
*''Judge Dee at Work'', short stories
*''Necklace and Calabash''
*''Poets and Murder''
The Judge Dee Stories in the order in which they were set
''Judge Dee at Work'' contains a "Judge Dee Chronology" telling of Dee's various posts, stories -- either books or short stories -- set during that posting, and giving information about the stories. Based on this chronology, the works can be arranged in this order:
* 663 - Judge Dee is a magistrate of Peng-lai, a fictional district on the north-east coast of China.
** ''The Chinese Gold Murders''
** ''The Lacquer Screen''.
** ''Five Auspicious Clouds'', a short story in ''Judge Dee at Work''
** ''The Red Tape Murders'', a short story in ''Judge Dee at Work''
** ''He came with the Rain'', a short story in ''Judge Dee at Work''
* 666 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Han-yuan, a fictional district on a lakeshore near the capital of Chang-An.
** ''The Chinese Lake Murders''
** ''The Morning of the Monkey'', a short story in ''The Monkey and the Tiger''
** ''The Murder on the Lotus Pond'', a short story in ''Judge Dee at Work''
* 666 - Judge Dee is traveling and forced to take shelter in a monastery.
** ''The Haunted Monastery''
* 668 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Poo-yang, a fictional wealthy district through which the Grand Canal of China runs .
** ''The Chinese Bell Murders''
** ''The Two Beggars'', a short story in ''Judge Dee at Work''
** ''The Wrong Sword'', a short story in ''Judge Dee at Work''
** ''The Red Pavilion''
** ''The Emperor's Pearl''
** ''Poets and Murder''
** ''Necklace and Calabash''
* 670 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Lan-fang, a fictional district at the western frontier of Tang China.
** ''The Chinese Maze Murders''
** ''The Phantom of the Temple''
** ''The Coffins of the Emperor'', a short story in ''Judge Dee at Work''
** ''Murder on New Year's Eve'', a short story in ''Judge Dee at Work''
* 676 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Pei-chow, a fictional district in the far north of Tang China.
** ''The Chinese Nail Murders''
** ''The Night of the Tiger'', a short story in ''The Monkey and the Tiger''
* 677 - Judge Dee is the Lord Chief Justice in the Imperial capital of Chang-An.
** ''The Willow Pattern''
* 681 - Judge Dee is the Lord Chief Justice for all of China.
** ''Murder in Canton''
Two books, ''Poets and Murder'' and ''Necklace and Calabash'', were not listed in the chronology but they were both from the time when Judge Dee was the magistrate in Poo-yang.
Selected scholarly works
* . ''A Blackfoot-English vocabulary based on material from the Southern Peigans''. Amsterdam, Uitgave van de N. V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1934. 12.
*''The Lore of the Chinese lute; an essay in ch'in ideology''
*''Hsi K'ang and his Poetical Essay on the Lute''
*''Siddham; An Essay on the History of Sanskrit Studies in China and Japan''
*''Sexual Life in Ancient China. A preliminary survey of Chinese sex and society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D.'' .
*''The gibbon in China. An essay in Chinese animal lore''
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