Offered for sale by Adam Langlands of 'Shadowrock Rare Books' - for more information please contact him via email at adamlanglands@gmail.com 

Robert Hans van GULIK (1910-1967). Hsi K’Ang and his poetical essay on the lute by R.H. van Gulik Ph.D.  [Monumenta Nipponica Monographs]. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1941. Quarto (10 ¼ x 7 1/2in; 260 x 191mm). Pp. [i-x; 1-]2-90; [i-ii]. Tinted frontispiece. 13 pages Chinese text. ‘Errata and Addenda;’ leaf loosely inserted. Original blue paper wrappers (light discoloration, backstrip chipped and discolored).

Very rare first edition in book-form. A relatively early work from novelist, diplomat and orientalist Robert van Gulik.  The work first appeared serially in ‘Monumenta Nipponica’, the first part in July 1938, the second in Jan. 1939 and the last in January 1940, A revised version of the whole work was published in 1969. No copies are listed as having sold at auction, and there is currently only one other copy for sale. Van Gulik ‘was a Dutch orientalist, diplomat, musician (of the guqin), and writer, best known for the Judge Dee historical mysteries, the protagonist of which he borrowed from the 18th-century Chinese detective novel Dee Goong An. Robert van Gulik was born in Zutphen, the son of a medical officer in the Dutch army of what was then called the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). He was born in the Netherlands, but from the age of three till twelve he lived in Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta), where he was tutored in Mandarin and other languages. He went to Leiden University in 1929 and obtained his PhD in 1935 from Utrecht University. 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 (Japan and China). He was in Tokyo when Japan declared war on the Netherlands in 1941, but he, along with the rest of the Allied diplomatic staff, was 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, Shui Shifang, the daughter of a Qing dynasty Imperial mandarin, and they had four children together. After the war ended, he returned to the Netherlands, then went to the United States as the counsellor 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, the translation 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, and Beirut (during the 1958 Civil War) to The Hague. In 1959 Van Gulik became correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, he resigned in 1963. In 1964 he became a full member, and the next year he became a foreign member. From 1965 until his death from cancer at The Hague in 1967, he was the Dutch ambassador to Japan.’ (wikipdia)

See “R. H. van Gulik: Diplomat, Orientalist, Novelist” by Henry Wessells  (https://endlessbookshelf.net/rhvangulik.html).

See A Bibliography of Dr. R.H. van Gulik, compiled by A.M. Evers (Boston : Department of Special Collections, Boston University Libraries, 1983).