Gulik, Robert van

Robert Hans van Gulik was born in Zutphen, the Netherlands, and grew up in Batavia (now Jakarta) in the former Dutch East Indies, where his father served as a medical officer in the Dutch Army. Van Gulik’s father collected Chinese porcelain and passed his interest on to his son who taught himself Mandarin. Robert van Gulik was fascinated by Chinese history and culture, and he became an authority on the subject even in China. He returned to the Netherlands in order to study law and languages in Leiden and Utrecht. He had a great gift for languages and he spoke, for example, Japanese, Tibetan, Sanskrit and Russian. After passing his Ph.D. with the dissertation Hayagriva : The Mantrayanic Aspect of Horse-cult in China and Japan, in 1935 he got a job at the Dutch office of foreign affairs, and because of his language proficiency he was stationed in Japan and China. In 1943, he met Shui Shih-fang, the daughter of a senior civil servant descended from the emperor. They married and had four children together, although van Gulik never tried to conceal his many mistresses.