History of Sinology/Chapter 10

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Chapter 10: The Netherlands — From the VOC to Leiden’s Global Reach

1. The Dutch East India Company and Early Contacts

Dutch sinology has a character all its own. Unlike the French tradition, which grew from the soil of Jesuit missions and Enlightenment philosophical curiosity, or the British tradition, which was shaped by Protestant missionary zeal and the needs of diplomacy, Dutch sinology originated in the commercial enterprise of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) — the Dutch East India Company — and in the colonial administration of the Netherlands East Indies. This mercantile and colonial genesis gave Dutch sinology a distinctive set of concerns: the study of overseas Chinese communities, the languages and customs of South China and Southeast Asia, and the social and economic life of the Chinese diaspora. Only in the twentieth century did Dutch sinology fully enter the mainstream of European Chinese studies, turning its attention from the Chinese periphery to the Chinese centre.

The earliest Dutch accounts of China were the products of commercial voyaging. In 1592, Waghenaer’s Treasure of Navigation included observations on China by Pomponius; in 1595, Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Travel Account of the Portuguese to the Orient offered a more substantial account based on both personal experience and Portuguese archival materials. As Zhang Xiping notes, Dutch sinological historians have characterised these early travellers as “wanderers in a fairy-tale world rather than cultivators of virgin soil” — observers recording marvels rather than scholars analysing a civilisation.

The transformation from casual observation to systematic study was driven by the commercial needs of the VOC, which established trading posts across Southeast Asia, including on the coast of South China and in Taiwan, during the seventeenth century. The prosperity of Sino-Dutch trade generated a demand for linguistic competence and cultural knowledge that the Dutch universities would eventually be called upon to supply.

The seventeenth century produced a handful of noteworthy Dutch contributions to the study of China. In 1628, the Dutch missionary Heurnius compiled a Chinese-Dutch-Latin dictionary during his missionary work in Java. Professor Golius wrote a treatise on the Chinese calendar. Vossius studied Chinese annals. And in 1797, Houckgeest published his account of the Dutch East India Company’s embassy to the Chinese emperor in 1794–1795. These efforts, however, remained scattered and unsystematic.

Dutch sinological historians date the true beginning of their tradition to 1876, when Gustav Schlegel was appointed to a specially created chair of Chinese studies at Leiden University. As Zhang Xiping records, Schlegel himself, in his inaugural lecture of 27 October 1877, surveyed the state of sinological research in Europe and China and concluded that “in establishing a new professorship, the Netherlands was not at all behind the times.” He noted that previous attempts to establish Chinese language instruction at other European universities had been “of little effect or utterly useless,” and that even in France, where a chair had existed since 1814, “the situation was much the same.”

2. Gustav Schlegel and the Leiden Tradition

Gustav Schlegel (1840–1903) was a former official of the Dutch East India Company who had served in Indonesia and Fujian, where he learned both Mandarin and Hokkien. As a scholar, he insisted on the primacy of direct engagement with Chinese texts — his famous maxim was “Just read, don’t fuss about grammar!” (Alleen maar lezen, niets met grammatica te maken!) — a principle that remains characteristic of the Leiden school to this day.

Schlegel’s scholarly interests were remarkably broad. He compiled a four-volume Dutch-Chinese dictionary written in the Quanzhou dialect (Nederlandsch-Chineesch Woordenboek, 1886–1890); published studies of the Heaven and Earth Society (Thian Ti Hwui, 1866) and Chinese astronomy (Uranographie Chinoise, 1875); and, most consequentially, co-founded the T’oung Pao in 1890 with the French bibliographer Henri Cordier. The T’oung Pao, published in English, French, and German by the Leiden firm of Brill, became the oldest and, by general consensus, the most authoritative sinological journal in the world — a position it retains today.

The founding of the T’oung Pao was itself a significant achievement of Dutch-French scholarly collaboration. From its inception, the journal was co-edited by a Leiden professor and a French sinologist — a practice that continues to the present day. Among its editors have been Pelliot, Duyvendak, Demiéville, Zürcher, and Gernet. Zhang Xiping notes that the journal “does not publish purely methodological articles or purely theoretical papers without new documentary evidence or textual analysis based on classical Chinese rather than foreign-language translations” — a standard that reflects the philological rigour of the tradition that produced it.

The institutional framework established by Schlegel — the Leiden chair, the T’oung Pao, the training of interpreters for the colonial service — set the pattern for Dutch sinology for the next half-century.

3. J.J.M. de Groot — Between Leiden and Berlin

Jan Jakob Maria de Groot (1854–1921) was Schlegel’s student and, in many ways, his intellectual heir. Like his teacher, De Groot had served in the Netherlands East Indies, where he developed an abiding interest in the religious and social life of the Chinese immigrant communities of Southeast Asia.

De Groot’s major work, The Religious System of China (6 volumes, 1892–1910), was a monumental study of Chinese popular religion based on fieldwork among the Hokkien-speaking Chinese of Amoy (Xiamen) and the overseas Chinese of Indonesia. His other significant publications included Les fêtes annuellement célébrées à Émoui (Annual Festivals of the Amoy Chinese, 1886), Universismus (1918), Chinesische Urkunden zur Geschichte Asiens (Chinese Documents on Asian History, 1926), and Le code du Mahayana en Chine (1891). He also assembled an important collection of artefacts relating to the folk customs, clothing, and theatrical traditions of the Minnan region, now preserved in the Leiden National Museum of Ethnology.

De Groot’s career illustrates one of the distinctive features of Dutch sinology. Honey, in Incense at the Altar, treats him in the section on German sinology — specifically as “Dutchman as Deutscher” — because in 1912, De Groot left Leiden to accept the chair of Chinese at the University of Berlin, where he served until his death. This transfer reflected both the international mobility of early twentieth-century sinologists and the prestige of the Berlin chair. But De Groot’s approach — the sociological study of Chinese religion based on fieldwork among overseas Chinese communities — was quintessentially Dutch, and his departure from Leiden provoked a long debate about the future direction of Dutch sinology.

The core question was whether Leiden should continue to focus on the study of overseas Chinese communities in the Dutch colonies — the tradition established by Schlegel and De Groot — or should reorient itself toward the study of China proper. The appointment of J.J.L. Duyvendak in 1919 resolved this debate decisively in favour of the latter course.

3b. A.F.P. Hulsewé and Chinese Legal History

Anthony François Paulus Hulsewé (1910–1993), the fourth occupant of the Leiden chair of Chinese, studied under Duyvendak and later in Beijing and Kyoto. Originally intending to work on Tang dynasty law, he changed course upon learning that Karl Bünger had already produced a study on the subject, and turned instead to the legal system of the Han dynasty. His doctoral thesis, Remnants of Han Law (1955), and his later Remnants of Ch’in Law (1985), established him as the leading Western authority on early Chinese legal institutions.

During his twenty years as professor, Hulsewé supervised research on an unusually wide range of topics — early Chinese Buddhism, medieval Buddhist studies, classical Chinese fiction, and Marxist literary theory in the People’s Republic — though his own research remained focused on Qin and Han legal and institutional history. His breadth of supervisory interest reflected the small scale of Dutch sinology, which demanded that a single professor cover a remarkably wide disciplinary terrain. Zhang Xiping notes that these diverse research projects “opened new scholarly horizons for Dutch sinology and trained a cadre of research specialists.”[^fn_hulsewe]

4. J.J.L. Duyvendak and the Reorientation of Leiden Sinology

Jan Julius Lodewijk Duyvendak (1889–1954) was De Groot’s student who, after a period of service in the Dutch diplomatic corps (1912–1918), was appointed associate professor of Chinese studies at Leiden in 1919. His appointment marked a watershed in the history of Dutch sinology.

Duyvendak was the first Dutch sinologist to shift the focus of teaching and research decisively from the overseas Chinese communities of the Netherlands East Indies to China itself. As Zhang Xiping explains: “The study of Chinese folk religion and secret societies gave way to the study of Chinese classical philosophers and Chinese state institutions; the emphasis on southern dialects such as Hokkien gave way to the training in the national language, guoyu. In short, the study of China’s ‘little tradition’ was replaced by the study of China’s ‘great tradition.’”

This reorientation was not merely a matter of personal preference. It reflected the political transformations of the early twentieth century — the fall of the Qing dynasty, the rise of Chinese nationalism, the changing character of Dutch colonial administration — which demanded a new type of China specialist: one who could engage with mainstream Chinese society and contemporary political developments, not merely with the marginal communities of the colonial periphery.

Duyvendak was the first Dutch sinologist to take an interest in the May Fourth Movement and modern Chinese literature; he introduced Luo Xun and Hu Shi to the Dutch reading public. His publications ranged widely: China tegen de Westerkim (China Encounters the West, 1927), which combined studies of Chinese printing, Wang Yangming’s philosophy, and the New Literature Movement; Wegen en gestalten der Chineesche geschiedenis (Paths and Figures of Chinese History, 1935); and translations of the Tao Te Ching (1942) and the Book of Lord Shang (1928). The latter, a study of the Legalist philosopher Shang Yang, established Duyvendak’s international reputation as a philologist and specialist in pre-Qin thought.

In 1930, Duyvendak was promoted to full professor and delivered his inaugural lecture on “History and Confucianism.” In the same year, the Sinological Institute (Sinologisch Instituut) was formally established at Leiden, with Duyvendak as its first director. He also founded the Leiden series of sinological monographs, published by Brill, which continues to appear and “represents the collective achievement and scholarly authority of Leiden sinology.”

During the thirty-five years of Duyvendak’s tenure at Leiden (1919–1954), Dutch sinology was profoundly shaped by his personality and interests. He was an internationally renowned scholar who served as visiting professor at Columbia University and attracted students from around the world. Even during the Second World War, when Leiden University was closed by the German occupation, he continued to teach under extraordinarily difficult conditions. His students produced a substantial body of important dissertations, many of which were published in the Leiden sinological series.

Duyvendak also played a role in the institutional life of international sinology. His involvement with the T’oung Pao — he served as its Dutch co-editor — reinforced the journal’s position as the premier sinological publication in Europe. Honey notes his contribution to the editorial policy of the T’oung Pao in a discussion of Pelliot’s collaboration with the journal.

5. Robert van Gulik — Diplomat, Novelist, Sinologist

Robert Hans van Gulik (1910–1967) was the most colourful and perhaps the most widely known Dutch sinologist of the twentieth century. A career diplomat who served in Tokyo, Chongqing, Nanjing, Washington, New Delhi, Beirut, Kuala Lumpur, and finally as ambassador to Japan, Van Gulik combined his official duties with an extraordinarily productive scholarly and literary career.

Van Gulik was born in Zutphen and spent part of his childhood in the Netherlands East Indies. He studied Chinese at Leiden but took his doctorate at Utrecht with a dissertation on an Indian subject. His intellectual interests were boundless: he was fluent in Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and several other languages; he played the Chinese guqin (seven-stringed zither); he practised Chinese calligraphy and seal-carving; he collected Chinese antiquities, including rare qin scores and Ming-dynasty woodblock-printed novels; and he kept a pet gibbon.

His scholarly publications covered an astonishing range. His The Lore of the Chinese Lute (Qin dao, 1940) remains the standard Western study of the guqin tradition. Siddham: An Essay on the History of Sanskrit Studies in China and Japan (1956) explored the transmission of Indian learning to East Asia. His T’ang-yin-pi-shih: Parallel Cases from Under the Pear-Tree (1956) was a translation and study of a thirteenth-century Chinese manual of jurisprudence. His study of Mi Fu’s Yanshi (History of the Inkstone, 1938) and his Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur (1958) demonstrated his expertise in Chinese art and material culture.

Van Gulik’s most controversial scholarly works were his studies of Chinese sexual culture: Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (Mi xi tu kao, 1951, privately printed in Tokyo in an edition of fifty copies) and Sexual Life in Ancient China (Zhongguo gudai fang nei kao, 1961). These works, pioneering in their frankness and based on rare primary sources, established Van Gulik as the founding figure in the Western study of Chinese sexuality. Zhang Xiping notes that his interest in this subject was prompted by his discovery of late-Ming erotic prints during his collecting activities — “a venturesome act in the conservative era in which he lived.”

Van Gulik’s fame among non-specialist readers, however, rests on his series of seventeen detective novels featuring Judge Dee (Di Renjie), a seventh-century magistrate. Inspired by his translation of the eighteenth-century Chinese detective novel Di gong an (1949), Van Gulik wrote the Judge Dee stories in English, translated some of them into Chinese and Japanese himself, and illustrated them in the style of traditional Chinese woodblock prints. Published during the 1950s and 1960s, the novels were bestsellers that were serialised in newspapers, adapted for television, and translated into dozens of languages. They remain in print today and continue to introduce Western readers to Chinese legal culture, social customs, and aesthetic sensibilities.

What distinguished Van Gulik from many Orientalists was the depth of his personal engagement with the cultures he studied. He did not merely analyse Chinese culture from a scholarly distance; he lived it. He played the guqin at a level that won the admiration of Chinese connoisseurs; he practised calligraphy and seal-carving as arts rather than academic exercises; he wrote the Judge Dee novels in a style that blended classical Chinese literary conventions with Western narrative technique. His collection of Chinese antiquities — particularly his qin scores and Ming-dynasty woodblock-printed fiction — was assembled with the eye of a connoisseur as well as a scholar. Zhang Xiping observes that Van Gulik’s approach to Chinese culture was characterised by an “intense interest in the tastes and pleasures of the traditional Chinese literatus” (对中国传统文人的雅兴和嗜好有浓厚的兴趣) that made him unique among Western sinologists.[^fn_vg_method]

His last published work, The Gibbon in China (Changbi yuan kao, 1967), was a characteristically eccentric study of the ape in Chinese literature and art — a fitting conclusion to a career that had ranged from Sanskrit philology to Chinese erotica to detective fiction. Van Gulik died in The Hague in 1967 at the age of fifty-seven, his diplomatic career cut short by illness.

Van Gulik’s collection of Chinese books, including many rare editions, was bequeathed to the Leiden Sinological Institute. Zhang Xiping observes that “his erudition and versatility astonished many Western sinologists and won the admiration of even the most learned Chinese scholars.”

6. Wilt Idema and Literary Sinology

The post-war period saw a flowering of literary sinology at Leiden that gave the Dutch school an international prominence in the study of Chinese literature that it had not previously enjoyed.

Before turning to literary studies, the contribution of Erik Zürcher (1928–2008), who held the chair of East Asian history at Leiden from 1962 to 1993 and served as co-editor of the T’oung Pao. His doctoral thesis, The Buddhist Conquest of China (1959), was a landmark study of the spread and adaptation of Buddhism in early medieval China that demonstrated his interest in the processes by which Chinese civilisation absorbed and transformed foreign intellectual systems — a theme he later extended to the Jesuit mission and, in unpublished work, to Marxism. Zürcher also founded the Documentation Centre for Contemporary China at Leiden (1969) and pioneered the use of visual historical materials in teaching.

Wilt Lukas Idema (born 1944) was the first Dutch sinologist to make Chinese classical literature the primary focus of his research. Inspired by reading Van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels as a young man, he studied Chinese at Leiden and pursued graduate work at Kyoto University under Tanaka Kenji, studying Yuan drama and vernacular fiction. Returning to Leiden in 1970, he was appointed professor in 1975 and served as chair and director of the Sinological Institute from 1978.

Idema’s scholarly output has been vast and varied. His doctoral thesis on early Chinese vernacular fiction established his expertise in the huaben tradition. His comparative studies of Shijingshan tang huaben and the Sanyan collections illuminated the editorial practices of Feng Menglong. His major English-language publications include Chinese Theater 1100–1450: A Source Book (with Stephen H. West), a monumental anthology that included translations of five complete zaju plays and extensive documentation on the social context of theatrical performance.

Zhang Xiping emphasises Idema’s methodological distinctiveness. Unlike scholars who studied Chinese drama primarily through the literary text (quwen), Idema insisted on the importance of stage directions, dialogue, and performance context — an approach shaped by his own youthful experience of writing and performing plays, and by his sociological training in Japan. He argued that dramatic texts were written for performance, not for private reading, and that understanding drama required attention to the performers — “the people who truly gave stories and plays their life force.”

Idema also took seriously his obligation to make Chinese culture accessible to the Dutch public. With Lloyd Haft, he co-authored a Dutch-language history of Chinese literature (Chinese Letterkunde) that was later translated into English. He systematically translated Chinese classical poetry, fiction, and drama into Dutch — works by Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, stories from the Sanyan and Liaozhai, and five Yuan zaju plays — making him the most prolific translator of Chinese literature into the Dutch language.

Idema’s significance extends beyond his individual publications to the methodological reorientation he brought about in the study of Chinese literature at Leiden. His insistence that Chinese drama and vernacular fiction must be understood as performed arts — not merely as literary texts — challenged the text-centred approaches that had dominated both Chinese and Western scholarship. He argued that the relationship between different genres — the common plots shared by drama, fiction, and oral narrative (shuochang) — could only be understood by attending to the social contexts of performance. Why did the same story take different forms in a zaju play and in a huaben tale? Was the difference due to the requirements of different genres, or to differences in the authors’ ideological commitments? These questions, which Idema pursued across his career, brought the study of Chinese literature into productive dialogue with performance studies, anthropology, and sociology.

As a translator, Idema combined scholarly rigour with an unusual sensitivity to the demands of readability. His Dutch translations of the Shijing, of poems by Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Du Mu, and Li Shangyin, and of stories from the Liaozhai zhiyi made Chinese classical literature genuinely accessible to Dutch readers for the first time. He also co-authored the first Dutch-language history of Chinese literature (Chinese Letterkunde), later published in English as A Guide to Chinese Literature (1997), a work that served as an introduction for both specialists and general readers.[^fn_idema_method]

Around Idema, a distinctive school of literary sinology took shape at Leiden. Lloyd Haft specialised in modern Chinese poetry, particularly the work of Bian Zhilin and Feng Zhi. Michel Hockx studied literary societies of the Republican period. Maghiel van Crevel became the leading Western authority on contemporary Chinese “Misty Poetry” (menglong shi), with a particular focus on the poet Duo Duo. Koos Kuiper translated Chinese film; Agnes Schroeder studied Suzhou mountain songs; and others pursued research on puppet theatre, popular narrative, and women’s script (nüshu). Zhang Xiping describes this group as having created “a rich and pluralistic research scene” that covered “all periods and genres of Chinese literature — ancient, modern, and contemporary — encompassing both mainstream and marginal, individual and collective, textual and performative dimensions.”

7. Contemporary Dutch Sinology

A distinctive strand of Leiden sinology has been devoted to the social and economic history of China and the Chinese diaspora. Eduard B. Vermeer, director of the Modern China Documentation Centre, combined the study of Chinese historical irrigation systems (Water Conservancy and Irrigation in China, 1977) with research on contemporary provincial economic development and on local history as revealed through stone inscriptions from Fujian. Harriet Zurndorfer specialised in the socio-economic history of Huizhou and the Huizhou merchant class, producing a major study of continuity and change in that region from 800 to 1800. Frank Pieke, trained in anthropology at Amsterdam and Berkeley, conducted groundbreaking fieldwork on the Chinese communities of the Netherlands and on the transformation of Chinese social networks from the danwei (work unit) system to individual agency during the reform era — research that took him from the Netherlands to Hebei province and eventually to a professorship at Oxford.[^fn_socec]

The social and economic history group thus perpetuated, in modified form, the Leiden tradition of attention to non-elite Chinese society and to the overseas Chinese diaspora — a tradition that dated back to Schlegel and De Groot but that was now conducted with the theoretical sophistication of modern social science.

Although Schipper (1934–2021) held a chair at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris before coming to Leiden, his Dutch nationality and his deep involvement with Leiden’s intellectual life make him a figure of Dutch sinology as well. His eight-year ordination as a Daoist priest in Taiwan — where he practised under the religious name Shi Ding Qing — gave him an insider’s understanding of Daoist ritual that no purely textual scholar could achieve. His monumental Projet Tao-tsang, an analytical catalogue of the entire Daoist canon, involved scholars from seven European countries and was supported by the European Science Foundation.

Leonard Blussé (born 1946), a historian at Leiden’s Department of History, has devoted his career to the study of Sino-Dutch relations, the overseas Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, and the VOC archives. His works include Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (1986), studies of the Dutch embassy to China, and the massive editorial project of publishing the VOC Taiwan archives. He has also organised the cataloguing of a large collection of Chinese commercial documents from Indonesia, including contracts, clan records, and business correspondence — primary sources of extraordinary value for the study of Chinese diaspora history.

Tony Saich (born 1953), though he later moved to Harvard’s Kennedy School, was trained at Leiden and contributed to the Dutch tradition of studying contemporary Chinese politics. His doctoral thesis on the origins of the Chinese Communist Party’s first united front, based on archival research on the Comintern agent Sneevliet (Maring), was published as The Origins of the First United Front in China (1991).

By the 1990s, the Leiden Sinological Institute had grown to over thirty faculty members and more than three hundred students, with one of the largest Chinese-language libraries in Western Europe. Four full professorships covered literature (Idema), history and religion (Schipper, later others), linguistics (Liang Zhaobing), and contemporary Chinese politics and administration. A Modern China Documentation Centre, originally founded by Zürcher in 1969, provided resources for the study of contemporary China.

A distinctive feature of Leiden sinology from the 1970s onward was its commitment to the modernisation of Chinese language teaching. Liang Zhaobing (born 1936), a Taiwanese-born linguist trained in multiple disciplines — English literature, medicine, anthropology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computer science — was appointed professor of applied Chinese linguistics in 1986. Before his arrival, Leiden had followed the traditional Dutch practice of teaching Chinese primarily through classical texts. Under Liang’s leadership, a modern Chinese language curriculum was established, including a year of study in China or Taiwan for fourth-year students, that transformed the practical linguistic competence of Leiden graduates. Zhang Xiping notes that Liang’s innovations “led the way in a new direction for Chinese language teaching worldwide” and that the fluent, standard Mandarin spoken by the younger generation of Dutch sinologists — Maghiel van Crevel, Michel Hockx, and others — was a direct result of his pedagogical reforms.[^fn_liang]

Liang also participated in international psycholinguistic research projects, collaborating with scholars from across Europe on the study of second-language acquisition, and trained several doctoral students who went on to become specialists in psycholinguistics and Chinese language pedagogy.

The T’oung Pao remains, more than 130 years after its founding, a monument to Dutch sinological enterprise and Dutch-French scholarly cooperation. Published by Brill in Leiden, jointly edited by a Dutch and a French scholar, and accepting contributions in English, French, and German, it has maintained its position alongside the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and the Journal of Asian Studies as one of the three most authoritative sinological journals in the world. Its editorial standards — the insistence on original documentary evidence, the requirement that textual analysis be based on classical Chinese rather than translations, the refusal to publish purely theoretical or methodological articles — embody the philological principles that have characterised the European sinological tradition from its inception.

One of the most significant — if often overlooked — contributions of post-war Dutch sinology was the transformation of Chinese language pedagogy. Under the leadership of Liang Zhaobing, Leiden developed one of the most effective Chinese language training programmes in Europe. The programme combined intensive classroom instruction in modern Chinese with a mandatory year of study in China or Taiwan — a requirement that was revolutionary when it was introduced in the 1980s but that has since become standard practice at leading sinological institutions worldwide.

The results were dramatic. Whereas earlier generations of Dutch sinologists had often struggled with spoken Chinese — Schlegel’s dictum to “just read, don’t fuss about grammar” reflected an era when reading classical texts was the primary skill demanded — the post-Liang generation could speak Mandarin with a fluency that astonished their Chinese interlocutors. This practical competence opened new doors for fieldwork, archival research, and scholarly exchange, and it ensured that Dutch sinology remained competitive in an era when Chinese language proficiency was increasingly taken for granted.

The integration of psycholinguistic research into language teaching was a particular strength of the Leiden programme. Liang’s participation in international research projects on second-language acquisition, conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and involving scholars from across Europe, brought the latest findings in cognitive science to bear on the practical challenges of teaching Chinese to Western students. This combination of theoretical sophistication and pedagogical effectiveness was characteristic of the Dutch approach — practical without being merely utilitarian, theoretically informed without being abstractly academic.[^fn_lang_extra]

The history of Dutch sinology reveals a distinctive pattern. Born from the commercial and colonial concerns of the VOC, it initially focused on the Chinese communities of the “maritime periphery” — the overseas Chinese of the Netherlands East Indies, the dialect-speaking populations of Fujian and Guangdong, the folk customs and secret societies of Southeast Asia. Under Duyvendak, it was deliberately reoriented toward the “great tradition” of Chinese civilisation — the classical philosophers, the state institutions, the national language. Under Zürcher, Idema, Schipper, and their colleagues, it achieved an international eminence in the study of Chinese religion, literature, and history that belied the small size of the country and its scholarly community.

Two features distinguish the Dutch tradition from its neighbours. The first is the Leiden school’s insistence on direct engagement with Chinese texts — Schlegel’s injunction to “just read” — a principle that has been maintained across five generations of scholars and that aligns Dutch sinology with the philological rigour of the French tradition. The second is the attention to non-elite, non-canonical, and “peripheral” dimensions of Chinese civilisation — folk religion, overseas communities, vernacular literature, popular performance — that reflects the Dutch tradition’s colonial origins but has also proved to be a source of scholarly creativity.

As Zhang Xiping concludes, the Dutch school’s contributions to the study of Chinese maritime commerce, overseas Chinese communities, and the social history of China’s coastal regions have “supplemented the deficiencies of mainstream Chinese historiography” and “corrected blind spots in Chinese scholarship’s own self-understanding.” This willingness to study what Chinese scholars themselves have sometimes overlooked — the “little tradition” alongside the “great tradition” — is perhaps the most enduring contribution of Dutch sinology to the international study of Chinese civilisation.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• De Groot, J.J.M. The Religious System of China. 6 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1892–1910.
• Duyvendak, J.J.L. The Book of Lord Shang. London: Arthur Probsthain, 1928.
• Duyvendak, J.J.L. Holland’s Contribution to Chinese Studies. London: The China Society, 1950.
• Schlegel, Gustav. Nederlandsch-Chineesch Woordenboek. 4 vols. Leiden, 1886–1890.
• Schlegel, Gustav. Thian Ti Hwui: The Hung-League or Heaven-Earth-League. Batavia, 1866.
• Van Gulik, Robert H. The Lore of the Chinese Lute (Qin dao). Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1940.
• Van Gulik, Robert H. Sexual Life in Ancient China. Leiden: Brill, 1961.
• Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1959.

Secondary Sources

• Honey, David B. Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology. American Oriental Series 86. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2001.
• Zhang Xiping 张西平, ed. Oumei hanxue de lishi yu xianzhuang 欧美汉学的历史与现状 (History and Current State of European and American Sinology). Zhengzhou: Daxiang chubanshe, 2005.
• Zhang Xiping 张西平. “Lecture 8: Development of Dutch Sinology” (第八讲：荷兰汉学的发展). In Lectures on the History of Western Sinology.
• He Yin 何寅 and Xu Guanghua 许光华. Guowai hanxueshi 国外汉学史 (History of Sinology Abroad). Shanghai: Shanghai Waiyu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2002.
• Zheng Haiyan 郑海燕. “Helan Zhongguo yanjiu de lishi fazhan” 荷兰中国研究的历史发展 (The Historical Development of Chinese Studies in the Netherlands). Guowai shehui kexue 国外社会科学, no. 3 (2005).
• Idema, Wilt, and Lloyd Haft. A Guide to Chinese Literature. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997.
• Blussé, Leonard. Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986.

References

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