About Robert Van Gulik

Short Notes André Ribeiro, Aug 2021

Robert van Gulik (Chinese name Gao Luopei 高羅佩, 1910–67) —“diplomat, Asian scholar, calligrapher, polyglot, polymath, passionate lover of life in all its forms”—is perhaps best known for his Judge Dee detective novels set in the Tang dynasty and his writings on the qin zither, as well as on imperial Chinese painting and erotica". (Jones, 2018). So begins the ethnomusicologist Stephen Jones about the most famous figure in Western Qin culture.

Most of his notoriety for qin players' communities is due to the extended essay entitled: “The Lore of the Chinese Lute” published in 1940. As an open doorway to the universe of the literary life of Chinese elite in the past, it goes a long way towards presenting what would have been the art of guqin in antiquity, in the eyes of Van Gulik and his fellow Chinese mates, with whom he had the opportunity to live over ten years of frequent stays in China, precisely between 1936 and 1946. An excellent article about it can be read here:

In the first text entry in the preface, the author introduces a quotation taken from “Playing the Lute on the River” 江上張琴 Jiāngshàng zhāng qín, by the Sung scholar 歐陽修 Ōuyángxiū (1007-1072):

“Although the tones of lute may be featured,” “When listening to them, who shall be able to fathom their significance?”

Needless to say he is the one who dares to fathom the universe of qin. It is not by chance that he considers his efforts an attempt to describe the cultural significance of this Chinese zither, call it “guqin” 古琴, which means the “ancient [ennobling] art of qin”. It's awe-inspiring how he did it by associating different sources in such a short time and with so little musical experience playing qin at the time. Van Gulik produced a breathtaking essay, full of quotes from Chinese sources, translated and commented one by one. This outstanding work deserves to be read with close attention.

Filled with insights and aesthetic revelations about an art restricted to a few connoisseurs, Van Gulik's text manages to achieve the feat of demarcating the beginning of what we could call the “Western Culture of the Qin.” It is rather bold (or lazyness) on my part to coin such an indeterminate term like this. After all, what would be the West in this relationship with qin? So, it is necessary to advance beyond the exhaustive process of academic definitions, to refer to the common use as the other side of anything; a weight on a scale that we know we have to handle to catch a glimpse of what's on the other plate. Leave metaphors aside, this epistemological discussion of East and West has long since frayed.

Therefore, I consider adopting the term “Western Qin Culture” as a phenomenon of reception performed by non-native Chinese musicians, who, immersed and characterized by Western cultures. It means the musicians that are rooted in the manners and habits inherited from the classical music environments, such as conservatories and music schools. So it be, we can notice a tendency attached to receiving the old qin culture as a cultural given, often inaccessible therefore needs to be decoded for a specific audience. It is to say that the relevance of his text to the culture of the gaze pointed to the Eastern produced the feat of establishing rich imagery (often unrealistic) with which every non-Chinese musician linked to the post-colonial world had to deal with.

Van Gulik was quite an acquaintance to other notorious people, such as Zha Fuxi, Guan Pinghu, Wang Mengshu, Pu Xuezhai, Xu Yuanbai, Laurence Picken, Joseph Needham and John Blofeld. So, most of his efforts is related to the atmosphere in search of cultural revitalization in China, which unfortunately, ceased at the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

In the short time he spent producing his extended essay, he could transmit his experiences on qin outside the cold analytical academic language. And so, he achieved a form of cross-cultural communication of great relevance for the future generations of Western-born interpreters that came after. Even indirectly, every Western qin player is indebted to Van Gulik's work as someone who opened the trails to others being touched by qin culture.

Since Van Gulik set the tone for the main Western narratives about the qin, still in circulation in academic circles (including the mediasphere), it is not too much to consider him a key figure in the qin studies. The idyllic character of Van Gulik's work, frequently raised by his critics as proof of the author's hedonism in the face of turbulent social changes in China at the time, it is seems to me a defense mechanism that resulted in a vigorous response to the disruptive moment that the global society was going through.

“The Lore of the Chinese Lute,” as a significant model of the historical record on the reception of qin art in the West, brought about two crucial changes: (1) allow considering qin culture as an intangible heritage to the eyes of Western institutions (especially in a moment of social turmoil); (2) set the main issues on how to think about research on qin — pointed us what we need to look at first.

Whether contesting or underlining Van Gulik's readings and research, his work remains seminal, in many aspects as a benchmark. His work occupies a unique place: it cannot be reduced to cold academic scientific methodology, nor presented as the product of an indulgent mind, passionate and concerned only with the exercise of poetic writing.

To adjust our understanding, I would say that it escapes the hasty categorization in situating it sometimes as a historical, ethnographic record, or as an authorial text inclined to poetic nature. In a way, it resists this cleavage. In short: Van Gulik's work is permanently embedded in what we called above the “Western Culture of the Qin”, sustained by it as a narrative bridge between different times and cultures of the gaze. The importance of Van Gulik's work to further developments of qin in Western is at the same time essential and immeasurable.