Studies on the History of Dutch Sinology: A Bibliographical Essay

Abstract

Despite the long Dutch presence in Taiwan (1624–1662) and the active trade between Batavia and China in the eighteenth century, the Dutch tradition of academic Sinology got underway only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the training of future officers for Chinese affairs in the Dutch East Indies was moved to Leiden. This training (often including an extended period of stay in China) remained the main task of Chinese teaching at Leiden until 1949, when Indonesia achieved independence. The earliest phase of Chinese teaching at Leiden has received an encyclopedic coverage in the work of Koos Kuiper. Scholars of the second generation who have received monographic treatment include J.J.M. de Groot and Henri Borel. The best-known Dutch Sinologist of the middle of the twentieth century was Robert Hans van Gulik who was not only a successful diplomat and highly original scholar, but also established an international reputation with his Judge Dee crime novels. His work has given rise to considerable scholarship in English and Chinese.

The Chinese and the Dutch share a history of direct contacts of more than four centuries.¹ As soon as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had established a foothold on Java, it also tried to obtain such a foothold on or off the China coast to support its trade. When its attempt to conquer Macao had failed, and the Ming authorities had told them to abandon the Pescadores where they were building a stronghold, they followed their advice and settled on Taiwan. If the Ming officials had hoped to control barbarians by barbarians, they did not achieve their purpose. The Dutch developed Tainan into a flourishing base for their trade in East Asia, pacified the local population, and attracted a large Chinese immigration from Southern Fujian. That Chinese population was happy to support Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功 (1624–1662) when he retired from the mainland and conquered the Dutch colony.

For the remainder of the seventeenth century and also the eighteenth century, the VOC focused its efforts on expanding its power in South- and Southeast Asia. While it continued to play a major role in the China trade, it left the leading role in Canton to the British. On Java, the Dutch encountered an established community of Chinese traders and immigrants. For most of this period, the Chinese were happy to collaborate with the Dutch in expanding their control, even though on occasion the two communities fell out with each other, for example in 1740 when the Chinese population of Batavia (modern Jakarta) was massacred when the Dutch authorities panicked after an attack on the city by Chinese migrants from the countryside.²

In the nineteenth century as well as the early decades of the twentieth century up to World War II, the Chinese continued to have a privileged position in the Dutch East Indies when compared with the mass of the indigenous population. The colonial administration continued to rely on their services, and from the final years of the nineteenth century took an active part in the importation of coolies. But with the intensification of colonial administration in the wake of the opening of the Suez Canal, the Dutch became more and more suspicious of the loyalty of the Chinese,³ a suspicion that only increased when they became aware of the growing nationalism in China and among overseas Chinese.⁴ Unwilling to rely exclusively on the services of the local Chinese headmen, the colonial administration set about to train specialists in Chinese affairs who would be experts in the language, laws, and customs of the Chinese, so they could read Chinese business accounts and assist the Dutch residents in dealing with problems involving Chinese. After several experiments in training such specialists in the Dutch East Indies had failed, the initial training of the interpreters was moved to Leiden—their training was to be completed by a lengthy stay in China.

These China specialists originally were located in those places that had a large Chinese population. Caught between the Dutch administrators and the Chinese headmen (none of whom wanted to relinquish any power), the function of interpreter never developed to the full satisfaction of the central administration in Batavia or of the interpreters themselves, and early in the twentieth century the China specialists were concentrated in the Office for Chinese Affairs (later the Office for East Asian Affairs), while the tasks of the China specialists became more focused on political surveillance and intelligence work.

To the extent that Dutch Sinology had its own characteristics it was during the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century when the practical aim of the teaching program was to train specialist bureaucrats for the colonial administration of the Dutch East Indies.⁵ The teaching faculty involved might include some great scholars, but their teaching aimed to produce bureaucrats, not scholars. After World War II, when Indonesia had become independent, the teaching program at Leiden had to be redesigned so as to prepare the students for academic careers. Since the final decades of the twentieth century the program in Chinese Studies has been swept up in a flood of changes that affected universities throughout the Western World: the explosive growth in student numbers, the corresponding expansion of the teaching faculty, and a pressure to shorten the curricula. Chinese programs were further affected by the sudden arrival of China on the world stage following the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in an explosive growth of students majoring in Chinese studies and a demand for a more practical training as the overwhelming majority of students hoped for a career in business in China.

The history of Chinese studies in the Netherlands has been described a number of times. There are a number of articles in English that provide descriptions from the earliest beginnings up to the time of the author, by J.J.L. Duyvendak, A.F.P. Hulsewé, Erik Zürcher, Harriet T. Zurndorfer, and me.⁶ There are also a number of articles in Chinese.⁷ More ambitious are the monograph by Xiong Wenhua 熊文华, Helan hanxue shi 荷兰汉学史 [A history of Dutch Sinology] (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe, 2012), and my own Chinese Studies in the Netherlands: Past Present and Future (Leiden: Brill, 2014).⁸ The latter is an edited volume which tries to present a comprehensive survey by a combination of some historical and, reflecting the disciplinary diversification of recent decades, several thematic chapters.⁹ My aim here is not to summarize the findings of these general surveys, but to introduce those publications on Dutch Sinology that focus on limited periods or specific individuals, emphasizing those that have been published since the beginning of this century. As they are living scholars and their works have not yet enjoyed monographic treatment, this essay will focus very much on the earlier periods when Dutch Sinology very much had its own characteristics.

Justus Heurnius, Pieter van Hoorn and Nicolaas Witsen

During the seventeenth century, China was very much on the mind of the Dutch, especially during the third quarter of the century. Chinese blue and white porcelain was eagerly copied by Delftware. The collapse of the Ming and the conquest of China by the Manchus inspired no less than two Dutch tragedies after De bello Tartarico (1654) had been published by the returned Jesuit missionary Martino Martini, who had his atlas of China printed in Amsterdam. The reports on the first (1655–1657) and second (1666–1668) VOC embassies to the court in Peking were published in gorgeously illustrated folio editions.¹⁰ The high visibility of China in the Dutch Republic has recently been studied in a research project at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, directed by the art historian M.A. (Thijs) Weststeijn. Funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, this project was titled “The Chinese Impact: Images and Ideas of China in the Dutch Golden Age” (2014–2019). One of the results of this project was Thijs Weststeijn, ed., Foreign Devils and Philosophers: Cultural Encounters between the Chinese, the Dutch, and Other Europeans, 1590–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

If, however, Sinology refers more specifically to the study of the Chinese language and the study of its culture on the basis of sources in that language, there are few Dutch activities from the seventeenth century that can be characterized as “Sinological.” The VOC was a strictly commercial venture and in general did not sponsor missionary activities, as these costed money and could easily lead to disturbances among the local population. The major exception was Taiwan where the protestant missionaries targeted the local Taiwanese population in their own language. In Batavia the local protestant minister Justus Heurnius (1587–1652) hoped to proselytize among the Chinese community there. To this end he worked on the compilation of a Dutch–Chinese dictionary and other materials. Heurnius was assisted in his studies by a Chinese schoolteacher from Macao who knew Latin. Heurnius's missionary efforts met with little success, and his writings, which have survived in manuscript, would appear to have had very little impact. These manuscripts, which had attracted some attention earlier, most recently have been studied in detail by Koos Kuiper, as “The Earliest Monument of Dutch Sinological Studies: Justus Heurnius's Manuscript Dutch–Chinese Dictionary and Chinese–Latin Compendium Doctrinae Christianae (Batavia, 1628),” Quaerendo 35.1–2 (2005), 109–39. When later in the seventeenth century the learned Amsterdam burgomaster Nicolaas (Nicolaes) Witsen (1641–1716) wanted to know the meaning of the seal-script inscription on an ancient Chinese bronze mirror discovered in Siberia, an extensive international correspondence resulted, as we learn from Willemijn van Noord and Thijs Weststeijn, “The Global Trajectory of Nicolaas Witsen's Chinese Mirror,” The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 68.4 (2015), 324–61,¹¹ but the translation that was eventually produced upon writing to Canton was far from perfect.¹²

Throughout the seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries in China had been working on the finalization of their Latin renditions of the Four Books. Eventually the dedicated efforts of generations of missionaries would appear in Paris in 1687 as Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, but parts of the project had been published before (Heurnius's manuscripts also already contain translations of several chapters from the Lunyu). Unfortunately, it is not clear where Pieter van Hoorn (b. 1619) who served as VOC ambassador to the Manchu court in 1667–68 picked up his knowledge of the Lunyu which he displayed in his Eenige Voorname eigenschappen Van de ware Deugdt, Voorsichtigheid, Wijsheidt ende Volmaecktheidt, Getrokken uit den Chineeschen Confucius, en op. Rijm gebracht [Some major characteristics of true virtue, carefulness, wisdom, and perfection, drawn from the Chinese Confucius and put in rhyme] of 1675. In this long rambling poem in alexandrines at least twenty-five entries from the Lunyu can be identified, even though some have been rendered very freely by the inexperienced versifier. Almost all of the twenty books of the Lunyu are represented, but it is clear that Van Hoorn had a preference for short statement on virtue and that he avoided more complex dialogues, items involving numerous participants, and statements requiring historical annotation.¹³ Van Hoorn may have encountered a Latin version of the Lunyu in China when he stayed in that country in the period 1666–68 (dedicating the poem to his family, he called it “something beautiful I have brought you from China”), but he also may have been in contact with literate Chinese in Batavia, as is argued by Trude Dijkstra and Thijs Weststeijn, “Constructing Confucius in the Low Countries,” De Zeventiende Eeuw. Cultuur in the Nederlanden in interdisciplinair perspectief 32.2 (2016), 137–64.¹⁴ Printed in small numbers in Batavia, there is no evidence, however, that Van Hoorn's poem ever reached the Netherlands in colonial times; despite its originality, its impact must thus have been negligible—even on the author himself, as he was fired in 1677 from his position as member of the council for the East Indies for corruption.

Jean Theodore Royer, Isaac Titsingh, and Karl Gützlaff

China as a country administered by philosophes may have been attractive to French intellectuals of the eighteenth century as a means to attack the absolutism of French monarchs, but it failed to attract the attention of Dutch intellectual circles. While the Dutch, too, drank tea, bought armorial china, and followed the French fashion of chinoiserie for home decoration, China made no appearance in the Dutch representatives of the popular genre of the oriental tale.

For a serious intellectual engagement with China we have to wait until the years 1765–1780, when Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807) set out to build a collection of Chinese objects and visual materials on Chinese life that would give as complete a picture of contemporary China as possible in Europe. His “Chinese museum” in The Hague was accessible to visitors and achieved international fame. Even though Royer's collection also included some Chinese books, his attempts to acquaint himself with the language did not get very far in the absence of a teacher. Royer's life and his collection have been studied by Jan van Campen in his De Haagse jurist Jean Theodore Rovers (1737–1837) en zijn verzameling Chinese voorwerpen [Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807), lawyer at The Hague, and his collection of Chinese objects] (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2000). Van Campen's study includes a reconstructed catalogue of the collection which has largely been preserved in the collections of the Rijksmuseum at Amsterdam¹⁵ and at the National Museum of Ethnography at Leiden.¹⁶ A “slightly edited” translation of Van Campen's monograph that tries to strengthen the European context of Royer's activities and provides more detail on his Chinese contacts has been published as Collecting China: Jean Theodore Royer, Collections and Chinese Studies (Hilversum: Verloren, 2021), but this edition does not include the illustrations of the original Dutch publication.

One of the scholars with whom Royer collaborated was Isaac Titsingh (1745–1812). Titsingh spent decades in Asia as a VOC employee. He is best known for his writings on Japan, where he served from 1779 to 1784 as “Opperhoofd” (chief) of the Dutch trading post at Dejima in Nagasaki. When about to return to Europe in 1794, he was appointed to lead a VOC embassy to Peking. During this embassy he was accompanied by Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (1739–1801) who would replace him in case of his death. Studies on this embassy often are based on the report and the later publications of Van Braam, but the original of Titsingh's own diary during the trip has been rediscovered and edited by Frank Lequin as Isaac Titsingh in China: Het onuitgegeven Journaal van zijn Ambassade naar Peking [Isaac Titsingh in China: the unpublished diary of his embassy to Peking] (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 2005).¹⁷ The embassy's largely overland trip from Canton to Peking in the middle of the winter was quite an ordeal; the return trip in the spring was largely by boat and more comfortable, yet at all times the members of the embassy only had limited contacts with the local population. This is a pity, as Titsingh was an eminent scholar who could show surprised Chinese officials in Peking books on Japanese history written in Japan in classical Chinese.¹⁸ Titsingh's knowledge of Japanese and Chinese may have been modest, but when living in Paris upon his return to Europe, he was an important source of information for Jean Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832), the first professor of Chinese at the Collêge de France, who also published some of Titsingh's writings upon his death.¹⁹ Both Titsingh and Van Braam returned from East Asia with large collections of orientalia.²⁰

In the early nineteenth century the Netherlands Missionary Society funded the German Lutheran minister Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (Charles Gützlaff, 1803–1851) to convert the Chinese of Batavia. Gützlaff arrived there in 1826 but left again in 1828 to pursue missionary activities first in Thailand and later on the China coast. Gützlaff published extensively both in English and in Chinese, and in 1842 would become the second Chinese Secretary of Hong Kong, while he also would continue to train Chinese missionaries. During his fund-raising tour of Europe in 1850 his apostolic contributions would be eulogized at length by pious Dutch poets,²¹ who did not yet know that not all of Gützlaff's Chinese missionaries had lived up to his high hopes. Jessie G. Lutz and R.R. Lutz point out that Gützlaff continued to receive support from the Netherlands throughout his career.²² But it would not be any Christian fervor in the Netherlands that would result in the establishment of a chair for Chinese language and literature at Leiden University, but rather the practical needs of the colonial administration in the Dutch East Indies.

Johan Joseph Hoffmann, Gustaaf Schlegel, Jan Jacob Maria De Groot, and Henri Borel

During the final years of the eighteenth century, the VOC went bankrupt and all its possessions were taken over in 1798 by the Dutch state, then in its incarnation as the Batavian Republic. Over the course of the Napoleonic wars most of the Dutch overseas possessions were taken over by the British empire, but when the Dutch had regained their independence, now as the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the British kept the Cape Colony and Ceylon but returned Java and other islands. Over the course of the nineteenth century the Dutch continued to expand their colonial territories until they had reached the extent of modern-day Indonesia. The steamship and the Suez Canal greatly reduced the distance between the colony and Europe, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the Dutch wanted not only to rule the area, but also to administer its population. This required the training of a specialized corps of colonial administrators. In view of the special position of the Chinese in the Dutch East Indies, it does not really come as a surprise that a growing need was felt for the training of specialized officers for Chinese affairs.

Various attempts to train such specialized officers on Java did not produce the hoped-for results, so eventually the Ministry of Colonial Affairs turned to Johan Joseph Hoffmann (1805–1878).²³ Hoffmann, who eventually would be appointed as titular professor of Japanese and Chinese at Leiden, had never visited East Asia but had studied Japanese and Chinese while assisting Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold (1796–1866) in compiling his massive description of Japan.²⁴ Von Siebold was, like Hoffmann, German by birth. As a physician he had been stationed in 1823 at the Dutch trading post at Dejima, where he would stay until 1830, when he was banished from Japan. Von Siebold was a remarkable scholar who, once he had settled in the Netherlands at Leiden, set out to publish the results of the research he had conducted while at Nagasaki. In this work he was assisted for a number of years by a Chinese amanuensis, Ko Tsching Dschang / Kok Sin Tjong / Guo Chengzhang 郭成章, who became Hoffmann's teacher of Chinese (to be able to converse with him, Hoffmann first had to learn Malay). When Hoffmann was asked to teach Chinese to some suitable boys, he could answer that he already had trained one such pupil, Gustaaf Schlegel (1840–1903). Schlegel was dispatched to Batavia and continued his studies at Amoy (Xiamen) and Canton (Guangzhou). Following a number of years of activity as an interpreter and advisor for Chinese affairs, Schlegel returned to Leiden where he was appointed in 1877 as Professor of Chinese Language and Literature and entrusted with the training of the future generations of officers for Chinese affairs.

Schlegel's academically most gifted and most productive student was Jan Jacob Maria de Groot (1854–1921). De Groot would join him in Leiden in 1891 when he was appointed as Professor for the Ethnography of the Dutch East Indies, after years as an interpreter and extensive periods of fieldwork in Fujian and elsewhere.²⁵ De Groot succeeded Schegel upon his death as Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in 1904, only to leave Leiden in December 1911 for Berlin. His departure brought the first period of Dutch academic Sinology to an end, as he had no immediate successor. This was due in part to the strong criticism that had been levelled at the many and often massive publications of Schlegel and De Groot by Henri Jean François Borel (1869–1933). The latter was a headstrong Chinese interpreter who had come into repeated conflict with his superiors in the colonial administration over abuses the Chinese suffered. He accused his former teachers of having lost all contact with contemporary Chinese society, to the extent that they were unaware of the growing self-consciousness and nationalism among the Chinese. Borel, a successful writer, claimed a privileged understanding of the Chinese soul because he was “a poet,” a quality which conveniently excused him from the need to pursue in-depth research and made him quite an effective publicist, to the frustration of at least De Groot.

This period in the development of Dutch Sinology was first studied in considerable detail by Leonard Blussé in his “Of Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water: Leiden University's Early Sinologists (1835–1911),” in Leiden Oriental Connections 1850–1940, ed. Willem Otterspeer (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 317–53. This article was reprinted with some minor corrections in 2014 in Wilt L. Idema, Chinese Studies in the Netherlands: Past, Present and Future, 27–68. Since then, this period has been described in exhaustive detail by Koos Kuiper, The Early Dutch Sinologists (1854–1900): Training in Holland and China, Functions in the Netherlands Indies, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2017). The first volume of Kuiper's magnum opus is primarily devoted to the content and organization of the teaching of the future interpreters in Leiden and in China, whereas the second volume focuses on the tasks of the interpreters following their training in the Dutch East Indies. The second volume also includes a large number of appendices, starting with “Biographies and Bibliographies of the Sinologists” (pp. 939–1098).²⁶

In the first volume Kuiper starts out by tracing the discussions in Batavia and The Hague that resulted in the invitation to Hoffmann to train a small number of carefully selected students. The second chapter then discusses Hoffmann's instruction of several cohorts of students in Leiden, whereupon the third chapter deals with the adventures of these students in China where they had been sent to complete their studies—it took a while before the colonial administration realized that Hokkien (Emoy/Amoy, Minnanhua) and Hakka were the most widely spoken Chinese dialects in the Dutch East Indies and that Cantonese would be of only limited use. While in China, some of the students collected plant specimens and fauna, an aspect of their life there that is treated in a short fourth chapter.²⁷ The role of one of them, Carolus Franciscus Martinus de Grijs (1832–1902), in the negotiations leading up to the Sino-Dutch Treaty of 1863 is treated in the fifth chapter. The sixth chapter is then devoted to the institution of Chinese teachers/clerks for the interpreters when they took on their duties in the colonial administration. Once a certain number of interpreters were active in the Dutch East Indies, it was again attempted to train interpreters in Batavia, but these attempts were abandoned after a few years, as we learn in Chapter 7.

After Gustaaf Schlegel returned to the Netherlands, he strongly championed the reestablishment of a training program in Leiden. A first group of three students (including De Groot, who greatly disliked his teacher for his propensity for dirty jokes) was admitted in 1873, and a second group of again three students in 1875. Meanwhile Schlegel was first appointed as a titular professor, then following the reform of the Dutch universities around that time, as a regular professor in 1877. When describing these developments in Chapter 8, Kuiper also pays detailed attention to Schlegel's teaching methods and the life of trainees, who were not regular students. But barely had Schlegel pronounced his inaugural lecture than the Ministry of Colonial Affairs decided it had plenty of interpreters and decided not to admit new trainees. While Schlegel had some students who took his courses out of interest, the regular selection of trainees was only resumed in 1888, when five students (including Borel) were admitted, after which a fourth group was selected in 1892. Chapter 9 focuses on Schlegel's teaching in the 1880s and 1890s. Here the many writings of Borel on his student days allow Kuiper to go into much greater detail than in the preceding chapter. The two chapters on Schlegel's students in Leiden, is followed in Chapter 10 by a detailed account of the experiences of his students during their training period in China, where again the many publications of Borel are fruitfully mined. The first volume ends with a long tenth chapter on the compilation of Sino-Dutch and Dutch-Chinese dictionaries, in which most space is taken up by Schlegels magnum opus, his four-volume Ho Hoa Bun-Gi Lui-Ts'am: Nederlandsch-Chineesch Woordenboek met de transcriptie der Chineesche karakters in the Tsiang-tsiu dialect; hoofdzakelijk ten behoeve der tolken voor the Chineesche taal in Nederlansch Indië [Dutch-Chinese dictionary, with a transcription of the Chinese characters according to the Zhangzhou dialect; primarily for the use of interpreters for the Chinese language in the Dutch East Indies] (Leiden: Brill, 1886–1890), which eloquently testified to Schlegel's comprehensive knowledge of Hokkien, including its seamy sides.²⁸

While the first volume of The Early Dutch Sinologists is basically devoted to their training at Leiden and in China, the four chapters of the second volume focus on their functions in the colonial administration in the Dutch East Indies. These chapters are a major contribution to the colonial history of Indonesia, especially the history of the relations between the colonial administration and the various Chinese communities within the context of the racially segregated colonial society. Kuiper discusses respectively the activities of the Sinologists as interpreters and translators (Chapter 12), their various advisory functions (Chapter 13), and their studies and missions (Chapter 14). Chapter 15 finally describes the reorganization of the corps of interpreters into a body of officials for Chinese Affairs in 1896.²⁹ The second volume also contains nineteen appendices. The use of this monograph as an encyclopedic survey is facilitated by four indices (of personal names, subjects, titles, and geographical names).

Although Kuiper includes a biographical sketch of De Groot as one of the students of Schlegel, he does not discuss his Sinological work in great detail. That is regrettable because whereas Schlegel's publications nowadays are rarely if ever consulted (his most lasting contribution to Chinese studies is the foundation, with the French scholar Henri Cordier (1849–1925), of T'oung Pao ³⁰), De Groot's studies of Chinese religion, which combined historical inquiry with extensive fieldwork, are still inspiring. But the relative absence of De Groot in Kuiper's work is largely compensated for by R.J. Zwi Werblowsky's The Beaten Track of Science: The Life and Work of J.J.M. de Groot, edited by Hartmut Walravens (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2002).³¹ Werblowsky, who hails De Groot as “as one of the founding fathers (possibly the founding father) of ethnographic Sinology,” could make use of De Groot's “Diary,” made up of voluminous excerpts from the diaries he kept throughout his life with retrospective comments. His monograph is made up of four chapters, the first of which provides a detailed survey of De Groot's activities in the Netherlands and China, in the Dutch East Indies and, eventually, in Germany. The second chapter deals with De Groot's involvement in the coolie trade on behalf of the Dutch tobacco growers on Sumatra. The last two chapters are devoted to his academic pursuits. Chapter 3, “The De Groot Collections of Chinese Religious Statuary” describes De Groot's efforts to bring together a complete collection of religious statuary from Southern Fujian by ordering newly made images from professional woodcutters. These sets are now at the Musée Guimet in Lyon and the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden.³² The fourth and final chapter is devoted to an analysis of De Groot's study of Chinese religion, considering both the contradictions in De Groot's attitude toward it and his (apparent) turn-about from praise to condemnation. The volume also includes a detailed bibliography of De Groot's publications.³³

De Groot is listed as one of the homosexual Sinologists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century by D.E. Mungello in his Western Queers in China: Flights to the Land of Oz (Lanham: Rowman Littlefield, 2012), 75–80.³⁴ The unmarried and puritanical De Groot may very well have been a homosexual, but if he was one, he was a very repressed one. When he left Leiden for Berlin, it was not because his homosexuality had been exposed, but because he had exposed the real and supposed manifestations of homosexuality among Leiden students. De Groot's crusade against homosexuality culminated in the “hazing scandal” of 1911, when De Groot obtained a copy of the text of the freshmen show of the student fraternity. Together with some students De Groot prepared an annotated version that explained all real or supposed references to homosexuality in the text. De Groot had this version printed in 150 copies and mailed one copy to each of the 100 members of the Second Chamber and to each of the 50 members of the First Chamber of the Dutch parliament, requesting them to discuss the document in a combined closed session and to take action against the reported abusers. Parliament could not refuse the request as it came from a former teacher of Her Majesty the Queen, but, made up to a large extent of fathers and elderly relatives of the young men concerned, they decided to deal with the issue in the tried way of shelving problems, that is, by appointing a committee. De Groot then realized that his position at Leiden University had become impossible and decided to accept the long-standing invitation to move to Berlin (together with his best friend). The affair has been studied in great detail by the official historian of Leiden University W. Otterspeer in his De opvoedende kracht van de groentijd: Het Leidse ontgroenschandaal van 1911 [The educational value of hazing: the Leiden hazing scandal of 1911] (Leiden: Burgersdijk and Niermans Publishers, 1995), which includes both the full text of the freshmen show and the letter De Groot addressed to the members of parliament.³⁵

Kuiper not only quotes extensively from the writings of Borel, but also provides a biographical sketch. As Borel was a prolific author who during the last years of his life was a well-known theater critic in The Hague, the bibliography in this case is limited to works “related to his study of Chinese or his work as interpreter or Official for Chinese Affairs” (p. 956). Borel is also the subject of a monograph by Audrey Heijns, The Role of Henri Borel in Chinese Translation History (London: Routledge, 2021). In conformity with a major trend in contemporary translation studies, this work is not limited to a discussion of Borel's (Dutch) renditions of Chinese texts, but also treats his many articles and books that presented his views on Chinese culture to the world at large as well as his role as a cultural intermediary in the colonial society of the Dutch East Indies. As a translator of texts, Borel's most original venture was his contributions of three volumes in his series “De Chineesche filosofie toegelicht voor niet-sinologen” [Chinese philosophy explained for non-Sinologists] which presented his Dutch translations of extensive selections from the Lunyu (coupled with the Zhongyong and the Daxue), from the Daodejing, and from the Mengzi. These volumes were explicitly aimed at the general (Dutch) public, and each volume came with a long introduction and detailed notes. While these works were never translated into other Western languages, Borel's travel writings and his meditations on Daoism were rendered into other European languages, often to be reprinted multiple times. For all Borel's insistence on the rising nationalism among the Chinese of the early twentieth century, it is curious to note how rarely he moved in his translations of texts beyond the materials he had encountered in his student days.³⁶

Jan Julius Lodewijk Duyvendak, His Students, and Robert Hans van Gulik

De Groot was an international celebrity in his own day, but his scholarship had been severely criticized by the widely read Borel, whose understanding of contemporary Chinese culture would appear to be certified by the Chinese Revolution of 1911. Leiden University hesitated to appoint a successor to De Groot, uncertain whether to seek someone who knew the Chinese community in the Dutch East Indies and spoke its language or someone who was acquainted with the politics and culture in China itself and spoke guanhua rather than Hokkien. Eventually the university opted for the latter and hired J.J.L. Duyvendak (1889–1954) as lecturer for Chinese. Duyvendak had studied not only with De Groot but also with Édouard Chavannes (1865–1918) in Paris, after which he had served a six-year stint (1912–1918) as one of the interpreters at the Dutch legation in Peking.³⁷ There he had witnessed the turbulent history of the early years of the Republic, in which the Dutch legation had been caught up when Zhang Xun 張勛/勳 (1854–1923), following the failure of his short-lived restoration of the Qing dynasty in 1916 had sought diplomatic asylum with the Dutch. Duyvendak's appointment greatly frustrated those such as Borel, who felt more qualified and had counted on a professorial appointment for themselves. While choosing Duyvendak, who did not speak Hokkien, the university also stipulated that he would be accompanied by an assistant for teaching that dialect to meet the needs of the future officials for Chinese Affairs in Batavia.

Following his arrival in Leiden, Duyvendak would quickly establish his credentials as an expert on contemporary China by a series of substantial articles in Dutch on the political and cultural developments in China during the 1910s, including his personal interactions with Zhang Xun during the latter's year-long stay at the Dutch legation. He next busied himself with the translation of the Jingshan Diary 景山日記, an exposé of the inner-palace machinations preceding the Boxer Rebellion that turned out to be a fraud (as Duyvendak belatedly recognized in 1937), and eventually, following a second visit to Peking in 1926 and a meeting with Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980), obtained his doctorate in 1928 with a study and translation of the ancient legalist philosopher Shang Yang 商央. Once Duyvendak had obtained his doctoral degree, Leiden University made him a full professor. Most of his own publications from that date on dealt with various aspects of traditional China, and as a former student of Chavannes he became a major representative of the philological tradition in academic Sinology.³⁸ At the same time the majority of his students studied Chinese in order to pursue a career in the administration of the Dutch East Indies, and with that purpose in mind several of them combines their study of Chinese with the study of “Indian Law” (law of the Dutch East Indies).

During the interbellum years some Leiden academics involved in colonial studies became advocates of an “ethical policy” and argued that the colonial administration should first of all serve the needs of the local population of the Dutch East Indies—they envisioned that in a distant future the colony might achieve some form of internal autonomy or even independence. Confronted not only with a nascent independence movement in Indonesia itself but also with this “treason” inside government and academia, big business in the Dutch East Indies raised the money for the establishment of chairs in colonial studies (including a chair of Chinese) at the University of Utrecht in order to ensure the training of future colonial officials that would be committed to the status quo. The first occupant of the chair of Chinese in Utrecht, appointed in 1933, was Th.T.H. Ferguson (1871–1946), who was succeeded in 1940 by the Flemish missionary Jozef Lodewijk Maria Mullie (1886–1976), an excellent linguist who had acquainted himself with the language during the many years he had spent in Inner Mongolia and Northern China.³⁹

Following World War II and the Independence of Indonesia, the “Oil faculty”⁴⁰ at Utrecht faded from history as vacant position were not filled.⁴¹ At Leiden, Duyvendak, who died in 1954, was succeeded in 1956 by his former student Anthony François Paulus Hulsewé (1910–1993) who after Leiden had continued his studies in Peking and Kyoto. He arrived in Batavia to take up his duties in the Office of East-Asian Affairs just a few years before the Japanese invaded and spent the war in Japanese prison-camps. After the war he was appointed at Leiden as lecturer for modern Chinese. Hulsewé was the last Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Leiden University to have direct link with the colonial raison d’être of Dutch Sinology.

So far we have had no Koos Kuiper to describe the history of Dutch Sinology during the first half of the twentieth century. In Chinese Studies in the Netherlands: Past, Present and Future, the period of the teaching of Duyvendak and Hulsewé is covered by Barend ter Haar in his chapter “Between the Dutch East Indies and Philology” (pp. 69–104). Ter Haar stresses the many ways in which Duyvendak's scholarship was different from that of his predecessors. The teaching program at Leiden became much more rigorous, heavily stressing the ability to read classical texts (with their commentaries), and Duyvendak stimulated his students to pursue a PhD. Among his PhD students one encounters not only Dutch names, but also American scholars such as Arthur W. Hummel Sr. (1884–1975), Derk Bodde (1909–2003), and William R.B. Acker (1907–1974)⁴² (the presence of these Americans may be linked to Duyvendak's close connections to Columbia University, where he regularly taught summer courses in the 1930s). Duyvendak also was an institution builder who was very much responsible for the development of the Chinese library.⁴³ Ter Haar blames Duyvendak for the poor quality of the teaching of modern Chinese in the 1950s, but Duyvendak will of course have organized his teaching program in Leiden in the assumption that Sinologists would spend some years in China to pursue their studies in preparation for future employment. Ter Haar notices the interest in law of several of Duyvendak's students. As Chinese family law applied to Chinese in the Dutch East Indies, both Marius Hendrikus van der Valk (1908–1978) and Marinus Johan Meijer (1912–1991) published on family and marriage law. Hulsewé had intended to write on Tang law, but his eventual dissertation was The Remnants of Han Law, Volume I: Introductory Studies and an Annotated Translation of Chapters 22 and 23 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty (Leiden: Brill, 1955). Volume II never appeared, but following the archaeological discovery of many early legal documents Hulsewé would return to the field of law with his Remnants of Ch'in Law: An annotated translation of the Ch'in legal and administrative rules of the 3^rd century B.C. discovered in Yün-meng Prefecture, Hupei Province, in 1975 (Leiden: Brill, 1985).⁴⁴ Ter Haar characterizes Hulsewé as “The Last of the Philologists,” and while he continues to lament the limited capacities in spoken Chinese of Leiden students during the 1960s, he acknowledges that the Leiden training “did enable people to read Chinese in all genres for themselves” (p. 98)—perhaps a criticism of those China experts of the middle of the twentieth century who had a strong disciplinary training in one of the social sciences but relied on Chinese research assistants to read the texts they needed?

Duyvendak's internationally most famous student probably was Robert Hans van Gulik (1910–1967), but Van Gulik only took his BA in Leiden (in Chinese and in Indian Law). He did not get along very well with Duyvendak as the two men had very different personalities and interests,⁴⁵ and Van Gulik transferred to Utrecht for his MA and PhD. Because the Ministry of Colonial Affairs was economizing at the time, he ended up with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which posted him to Japan for his first appointment. From there he would visit Peking in 1936 and 1940 for contacts with traditional Chinese literati and pursue traditional arts such as calligraphy, painting,⁴⁶ and the seven-string Chinese zither (the qin 琴 or guqin 古琴, which Van Gulik preferred to call the Chinese lute).⁴⁷ Following the outbreak of World War II and the exchange of diplomats he would later be posted to Chongqing (1943–1946). His career as a diplomat would take him back to Japan in the early fifties, when he started to write his Judge Dee novels.⁴⁸ All the while he would also continue to publish original scholarship,⁴⁹ often related to his own hobbies and on subjects that at the time were ignored in academic Sinology.⁵⁰

Van Gulik is briefly covered by Ter Haar in his “Between the Dutch East Indies and Philology.” In doing so he could rely on the biography of Van Gulik by C.D. Barkman and H. de Vries-van der Hoeven, Een man van drie levens: Biografie van de diplomaat/schrijver/geleerde Robert van Gulik [A Man of Three Lives: A biography of diplomat/author/scholar Robert van Gulik] (Amsterdam: Forum, 1993).⁵¹ Both authors of this biography knew Van Gulik personally, Barkman as a fellow Sinologist and diplomat and de Vries as the wife of another diplomat. In writing their biography they in turn could rely on the detailed manuscript account of his life up to 1956 that Van Gulik had prepared for the English publisher of his Judge Dee novels in which he speaks very frankly about his early youth in the Dutch East Indies, his student days, and his adventurous bachelor years. For the decades following World War II the authors mostly limit themselves to a description of his diplomatic career, as they take the international fame of his Judge Dee novels for granted and apparently do not feel qualified to discuss his Sinological publications. Een man van drie levens sold very well in the Netherlands and was quickly translated into Chinese⁵² and French,⁵³ but it took more than twenty years before an English translation, by Rosemary Robson, appeared as Dutch Mandarin: The Life and Work of Robert Hans van Gulik (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2018). One aspect of Van Gulik's activities as a diplomat, his reporting on China, is analyzed by Lisanne Boer in Love is Blind: Political Views Expressed by Robert H. van Gulik (The Hague: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2004). The true Judge Dee aficionados will of course want to own their personal copy of Marco Huysmans, ed. Robert van Gulik (Zeeland: Boekerij “De Graspeel,” 2010). This richly illustrated book contains not only drawings and essays by Van Gulik, but also selected memories of the man and discussions of his Judge Dee novels by various authors, both in English and Dutch.

Van Gulik's Judge Dee novels, often based on originally Chinese plots, have been translated and retranslated in Chinese since the 1980s where they have enjoyed an enormous popularity, greatly contributing to the posthumous fame of the Tang official Di Renjie, whose ever more fantastic and complicated adventures have been turned into long multi-episode TV dramas since the beginning of the twenty-first century.⁵⁴ In China, Van Gulik's Sinological studies, especially his work on the Chinese lute and on sexual culture, have also been eagerly translated and studied. One of the most productive Van Gulik scholars has been Shi Ye 施晔, who in her Helan Hanxuejia Gao Luopei yanjiu 荷兰汉学家高罗佩研究 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2017) devotes separate chapters to Van Gulik's writings on the qin 琴,⁵⁵ to his publications on the appreciation and mounting of Chinese paintings, on his studies on the gibbon⁵⁶ and the horse-headed Guanyin, and on his engagement with traditional Chinese sexual culture. Her study further includes an evaluation of Van Gulik's translation of the Tangyin bishi 棠陰比事,⁵⁷ a study of the spread of his Judge Dee novels in the PRC, and an introduction to his Chinese library. Zhang Pin 张萍, Gao Luopei: goutong ZhongXi wenhua de shizhe 高罗佩：沟通众犀文化的使者 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2010) also has separate chapters on Van Gulik's studies on the qin and on the sexual culture of ancient China but is mostly devoted to a discussion of his Judge Dee Novels.

Two further biographies, both in Dutch and dealing with marginal figures in the history of Dutch Sinology, may be mentioned here to round off this section. Rudi Wester, Bestaat er een vreemder leven dan het mijne? [Is there a weirder life than mine?] (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2021) describes the life of Jef Last (1898–1972). Last is best known in the Netherlands as a social activist, poet, and novelist, but he was also one of the earliest students of Duyvendak at Leiden. Abandoning the study of Chinese after two years, he resumed his studies during World War II, and eventually obtained his BA in 1949. He went on to obtain a doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1957—his dissertation was published in 1959 as Lu Hsün—Dichter und Idol. Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte des neuen Chinas [Lu Xun: author and idol. A contribution to the intellectual history of the New China] (Berlin: Alfred Metzner). In later years he often traveled to East Asia, and he continued to publish on China, but these publications are marred by extreme carelessness. A.H. Huussen Jr., Johan Schotman 1892–1976: Psychiater, Dichter, Filosoof [Johan Schotman 1892–1976: psychiatrist, poet, philosopher] (Soesterberg: Aspekt, 2015) describes the life of a physician who spent many years in the interior of China in the 1920s. His own poetical effusions inspired by his stay in China have been rightly forgotten. His most important work may well have been his complete Dutch translation of the Book of Odes as Sji Tsjing: Het Klassieke Boek der Oden [Shijing: the Classic Book of Odes] (Deventer: Kluwer, 1969), which was repeatedly reprinted at the time.

New Beginnings

With the retirement of Hulsewé in 1974, the umbilical cord that linked Dutch Sinology to its colonial past was finally cut. That break with the past was in a way already symbolized by the appointment of Erik Zürcher (1928–2008) as full professor in 1961, even though his chair was not yet called “Chinese History” but “The History of East Asia, with an Emphasis on the Encounter of East and West.” Zürcher had come to Leiden in 1947 to study Egyptology, but he was converted to Sinology during his hazing period. In contrast to the earlier professors of Chinese, he had never spent any time in East Asia before his appointment.⁵⁸ And while earlier professors of Chinese were expected to have a universal knowledge of Chinese culture, he was very much an intellectual historian, focusing on the Chinese reception of foreign systems of thought. That did not mean that Zürcher was appointed in the Department of History at Leiden. Throughout his lifetime, that department remained very much focused on Dutch and European history. Even when its members studied the world outside Europe they tended to do so on the basis of the (admittedly extremely rich) Dutch colonial archives, and a scholar like Leonard Blussé (b. 1946), who in his work on early modern Taiwan, the Chinese community in Batavia, and the interregional trade in East and Southeast Asia combined these colonial archives with sources in Chinese, Japanese, and Malay remained an exception.⁵⁹ As the relevant chapters in Chinese Studies in the Netherlands: Past, Present and Future show, the last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a rapidly growing disciplinary diversification within Chinese studies, with the expanding staff specializing in linguistics⁶⁰ or literature, premodern or modern history, law, economics, or social developments.

Barend ter Haar called his second chapter in Chinese Studies in the Netherlands: Past, Present and Future, “Rediscovering Chinese Religion and Contemporary China” (105–26). It covers Dutch Sinology from the 1960s to the early years of the twenty-first century, with a focus on Chinese history, starting with an evaluation of the contribution of Erik Zürcher to Chinese studies. Zürcher established his reputation with his dissertation on the reception of Buddhism in China, which was published in two volumes as The Buddhist Conquest of China (Leiden: Brill, 1959; reprinted in 1972 and 2007). Zürcher would greatly stimulate the study of contemporary China with the foundation of the Documentation Center for Contemporary China in 1969,⁶¹ and would also play a major role in the improvement of modern language teaching at Leiden. In his own research he would continue to focus on the Chinese reception of foreign systems of thought, comparing the reception of Buddhism to the later reception of Christianity and of Marxism. These studies resulted in a continuous stream of articles, on the one hand continuing his study of Buddhism and on the other hand on the activities of Jesuit missionaries in late Ming and early Qing China (Zürcher never published much on Marxism and shied away from public debates on topics such as the Cultural Revolution). When Zürcher retired in 1993, he was succeeded by Kristoffer Schipper (1934–2021), well-known for his original work on Daoism,⁶² and when Schipper retired in 2000, the chair passed to Ter Haar himself, who has worked extensively on Chinese popular religion.⁶³ As Ter Haar notes, I myself (Wilt L. Idema, b. 1944) succeeded Hulsewé in 1976; I left Leiden for Harvard in 1999,⁶⁴ to be succeeded by Maghiel van Crevel, a specialist in contemporary Chinese poetry.⁶⁵

When Zürcher passed away several obituaries were published. Ter Haar singles out Ad Dudink, “In Memoriam,” Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 30 (2008), 1–16 as the best. Nicolas Standaert provided a lengthy evaluation of Zürcher's work on the Jesuit missionaries and their Chinese converts in his “Erik Zürcher's Study of Christianity in Seventeenth Century China: An Intellectual Portrait,” China Review International 15.4 (2008), 476–502. For an evaluation of Zürcher's contribution to the study of Buddhism one may consult Jonathan A. Silk, “Introduction,” in Jonathan A. Silk, ed., Buddhism in China: Collected Papers of Erik Zürcher (Leiden, Brill, 2013), 1–25.

***

Today the students of Chinese affairs tend to be academics who spend their whole careers within the cushioning walls of academia. If they travel to East Asia they usually do so on scholarships and are based at universities or research centers. Whatever their adventures of the mind, they usually live rather placid lives. One can only wonder how many of them will attract monographic treatment of their lives and works in years to come.