• 2010-04-18

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert H. van Gulik. Last year, National Tsing Hua University and NCL’s Center for Chinese Studies (CCS) collaboratively hosted the first part of a “Robert H. van Gulik and Material Culture” series of symposia, the 5 September 2009 symposium “Van Gulick’s Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period, Fifty Years On.” This year, the second installment of the international symposium was held on 18 April 2010, entitled “Robert van Gulick and Cultural History.” This installment of the International symposium invited a number of key international and domestic scholars to participate, initiating a dialogue on three books not often discussed in the Chinese scholarly world: Mi Fu on Ink-Stones; The Lore of the Chinese Lute: An Essay in Ch'in Ideology; and The Gibbon in China: An essay In Chinese Animal Lore. The symposium concerned the significance of material culture in these books, as well as an examination of van Gulick’s role in the transformation of twentieth century Western Sinological paradigms, looking more broadly to developments in cultural history.