Robert van Gulik with wife Shui Shih-fang 1946
Sample of authors
Gulik, Robert van
Robert Hans van Gulik was born in Zutphen, the Netherlands, and grew up in Batavia (now Jakarta) in the former Dutch East Indies, where his father served as a medical officer in the Dutch Army. Van Gulik’s father collected Chinese porcelain and passed his interest on to his son who taught himself Mandarin. Robert van Gulik was fascinated by Chinese history and culture, and he became an authority o...
Literary figures
Anastasia Kamenskaja
Gender: Female
The young, later middle-aged, Anastasia Kamenskaya is an analyst and investigator for the Moscow Police Department. She is linguistically gifted and beautiful, but is careless about her appearance and how she dresses. Her kind live-in partner (later her husband) looks after their home and accepts that she is often too tired for sex. She is also the main character in a long suite of novels by...