Gao Luopei: A Dutchman who is more Chinese than Chinese
Gao Luopei (1910-1967), also known as Xiaowang, also known as Zhitai and the master of Yinyue Temple, the Netherlands Sinologist, Orientalist, diplomat, translator, novelist.
His real name was Robert Hans van Gulik, and his father was a military doctor stationed in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Nowadays, if you search for "van Guilk" on search engines including Wikipedia, the entries will generally point to Mr. Gao. (van is equivalent to ?de? in French names, and ?von? in German names generally represents the person's noble family origin, similar to ?of? and ?from? in English)
Mr. Gao attended primary school in the Dutch colony of Java. After his father retired from the army, his family moved back to China. When he was 20 years old, he entered Leiden University in the Netherlands to major in Sinology. In just 2 years, he obtained three bachelor's degrees in Chinese, Japanese and colonial law.
After that, he furthered his studies at Utrecht University, which has the strongest comprehensive academic strength in the Netherlands. In 1934, he obtained a master's degree in Oriental Studies with an article on Mi Fu's discussion of inkstones in the 12th century.
After graduating with a master's degree in 1935, Goroupt directly entered the Dutch diplomatic community. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, he lived in Chongqing for a long time as the first secretary of the Dutch Consulate.
Golope is a talented linguistics master. In addition to his native Dutch, he is also proficient in English, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, German, French, and Indonesian. , Malay, Latin, Italian, Spanish, ancient Greek and Arabic and other 15 foreign languages.
Of course, what he loves most, and can even be said to be obsessed with, is Chinese and Chinese culture. There are examples to prove:
1. He started learning Chinese calligraphy when he was 20 years old and practiced it all his life.
2. He is obsessed with playing the guqin and is a student of many well-known Chinese qin masters. It took 7 years of research to prove that the Japanese way of piano was brought to Japan from China by a monk named Donggao who lived in Japan in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, and published it in the "Collected Journal of Zen Master Donggao".
3. Influenced by "Journey to the West" and obsessed with the image of Sun Wukong, he chose to feed gibbons as pets to accompany him. The last monograph he wrote during his lifetime was "Chinese Gibbon? Notes on Chinese Animal Legends"
4. He married a Chinese lady.
The last and most important point is that he was the first novelist to introduce the truly authentic ancient Chinese literary images to the Western world. His work "The Case of Di Gong of the Tang Dynasty" (also known as "The Case of Di Gong") "The Grand View of Judicial Cases") is well-known in the world of detective mystery novels, and the image of "Detective Di Renjie" he created is also known as the "Sherlock Holmes of the East".