Robert Hans van Gulik (Chinese: 髙羅佩; pinyin: Gāo Luópèi, 9 August 1910 – 24 September 1967) 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.

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.

Perhaps because of his upbringing in the East Indies, Van Gulik's interests were in later periods, and he transferred 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 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.

To the translation he appended an essay on the genre in which he suggested that it was easy to imagine rewriting some of the old Chinese case histories with an eye toward modern readers.

Van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries follow in the long tradition of Chinese detective fiction, intentionally preserving a number of key elements of that writing culture.

Nevertheless, van Gulik's fiction was adapted to a more Western audience, avoiding the supernatural and religious traditions of Buddhism and Daoism in favour of rationality.

Analyzing the portrayal of these apes throughout history, he notes how the realism of the pictures deteriorated as the gibbon population in most of China was extirpated.

As an art critic, he greatly admired the portrayal of the apes by such renowned painters as Yi Yuanji and Muqi Fachang.

[11] In 2022 and 2023 the personal archive and collection of Robert van Gulik was donated by his heirs to Leiden University Libraries.