A. F. P. Hulsewé | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | |||||||||||||
| Born | (1910-01-31)31 January 1910 | ||||||||||||
| Died | 16 December 1993(1993-12-16) (aged 83) | ||||||||||||
| Alma mater | Leiden University | ||||||||||||
| Spouses | C. Hoog(m. 1931-56, divorce) Marguerite Wazniewski | ||||||||||||
| Scientific career | |||||||||||||
| Fields | Chinese history, law | ||||||||||||
| Institutions | Leiden University | ||||||||||||
| Doctoral advisor | J.J.L. Duyvendak | ||||||||||||
| Notable students | Wilt L. Idema | ||||||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 何四維 | ||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 何四维 | ||||||||||||
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Anthony François Paulus Hulsewé (31 January 1910 – 16 December 1993) was a Dutch Sinologist and scholar best known for his studies of ancient Chinese law, particularly that of theHan dynasty (220 BC – AD 206).
Anthony François Paulus Hulsewé was born on 31 January 1910 inBerlin, Germany, where his father worked for a German firm as anelectrical engineer. Hulsewé's family was from the Dutch province ofGroningen and had traditionally been clergymen in theDutch Reformed Church, though his grandfather chose to go into farming and business instead of church service.[1] Hulsewé lived in Germany for the first several years of his life, but his parents became concerned about the increasing deprivations ofWorld War I and sent him and his siblings back to the Netherlands to live with an aunt inArnhem. Hulsewé's parents finally left Germany in 1919, and the family settled inBussum, a small town about 15 miles (24 km) east ofAmsterdam.[1]
During the early 20th century, the Dutch government offered national scholarships for university students to studyChinese andJapanese in order to ensure a supply of competent officials and administrators in theDutch East Indies.[2] After completing secondary school in 1927, Hulsewé took and passed the competitive examination for one of these scholarships, enteringLeiden University in the autumn of 1928 to study Chinese under the Dutch SinologistJ. J. L. Duyvendak.[3] His only classmate during his first year was Marius van der Valk (1908–1978), who studied Chinese and law, and later became a professor of modern Chinese law at Leiden.
Although the scholarships were intended to allow students to prepare to be colonial officials, Duyvendak required his students to intensively studyClassical Chinese and thephilological methods ofSinology.[4][5] Duyvendak's Chinese assistant Chang T'ien-tse, a native ofFujian Province, provided them with instruction in modernMandarin Chinese as well as some basic training inHokkien Chinese, which was the language of most of the Chinese residents of the Dutch East Indies.[4][6]
Hulsewé passed hisCandidaats (equivalent to modernbachelor's degree) exam in 1931 and moved toBeijing to continue his studies. While in Beijing, Hulsewé's instructor in Classical Chinese was Liang Qixiong (梁啟雄; 1900–1965), a scholar and the younger brother of famed Chinese writerLiang Qichao.[4] Hulsewé's former classmate Marius van der Valk encouraged him to study Chinese legal history, and so in 1932 Hulsewé began the large work of producing a fully annotated translation of theTang dynasty legal codes contained in the "Monograph on Norms and Punishments" (xíngfǎ zhì刑法志) sections of theOld Book of Tang and theNew Book of Tang.
In late 1934, Hulsewé moved toKyoto, Japan, where he divided his time between intensively studying Japanese and continuing his work on the Tang legal system under a Japanese scholar.[7] In 1935, Hulsewé moved to Batavia (modernJakarta, Indonesia) to take up a position in the Dutch Bureau of East Asian Affairs, where his job was mainly to gather political information from Chinese and Japanese newspapers.[7] He briefly returned to the Netherlands in 1939, where he passed hismaster's degree examination and submitted the first part of his "Monograph on Norms and Punishments" as his M.A. thesis.[7] Shortly after his return to Batavia, in 1942 the Japanese invaded the island ofJava. Hulsewé was made aprisoner of war and transferred toSingapore, where he was held until the end ofWorld War II.[7]
In 1946, after the end of the war, Hulsewé returned to the Netherlands, where Duyvendak offered him a position as a lecturer in Chinese at Leiden, which he accepted. Shortly after taking up the position, Hulsewé's work on Tang legal history was preempted by the German scholar Karl Bünger's publication of a book on the subject,Quellen zur Rechtsgeschichte der T'ang-Zeit, and Hulsewé abandoned working on the project.[7] Duyvendak was interested in focusing Chinese scholarship at Leiden on to theHan dynasty, and so Hulsewé began working on the legal history of that era. He did a large study as a Ph.D. dissertation, which was later published in 1955 asRemnants of Han Law, Volume 1: Introductory Studies and an Annotated Translation of Chapters 22 and 23 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty.
Following Duyvendak's death in 1954, Hulsewé was chosen in 1956 to succeed him as Professor of Chinese at Leiden, a position he held until his retirement in 1975.[7] Hulsewé and his second wife Marguerite Wazniewski then settled inRomont, Switzerland, where Hulsewé continued his research and writing in retirement. He died of aheart attack on 16 December 1993, aged 83.[2]
