How love of Chinese culture led a Dutch patrician to Taiwan
Simeon Vonk
Throughout history, many Dutch men and women have voluntarily served in foreign armies. Some sought adventure, others went for the money. There were also those driven by idealism and love for a country other than their native land. One such idealist was Willem van Lennep, the man who became known as Yuan-tao Liu. Liu’s love for Chinese culture led him through battlefields, air-raid shelters, and eventually to a veterans’ village in southern Taiwan.
Youth as a rich man’s son
Willem Hendrik van Lennep was born in Amsterdam in 1911. His parents both came from patrician families. Willem’s childhood was privileged. When he was six years old, his family moved to Huis de Trompenburgh, a country house in ‘s-Graveland near Hilversum. Here lay the seeds of William’s love of Chinese culture.
Huis de Trompenburgh was richly decorated with artifacts of the Chinese imperial court, collected in the eighteenth century. Impressed by the porcelain vases and lacquerware displays around him, Willem decided to study Chinese. His fascination with Chinese culture intensified when his father died and his mother revealed a family secret to him; the van Lennep family opposed her marriage to Willem’s father because her family was said to be of mixed ethnicity. This caused Willem to enthusiastically delve into her family’s genealogy. It turned out that he was descended from a Chinese woman named Ah-nio Lauw. This revelation gave Willem a deep sense of connection with the Chinese people. At the same time, the disapproval he felt by the van Lennep family made him feel alienated from the Netherlands. He told his mother of his determination to move to China. She accepted this, but warned him that the Chinese would never accept him as an equal. Willem replied that he did not care because he would never feel at home in Holland anyway.
Departure to China
Before moving to China, Willem became acquainted with the Chinese community in Amsterdam and took private Chinese lessons in Leiden. He became friends with the famous sinologist and author Robert van Gulik. After a year in Leiden, he continued his Chinese studies in Paris, where he met politically active Chinese students and joined the Kuomintang. With the help of Amsterdam and Parisian connections, Willem traveled to China in 1933. He settled in Guangzhou and married a Chinese woman named Liang Kwei-yen. They had a daughter together,
When Van Lennep saw the threat of a general military confrontation between China and Japan growing, he decided to move to Nanjing and enroll at the Whampoa Academy to become an officer in the Chinese army. To do so, he had to renounce his Dutch citizenship and officially change his name to Liu Yuan-tao.
Wartime service
After graduating as a first lieutenant, Liu was sent to the front in Henan in 1938. He served in a unit equipped with heavy artillery that defended a crucial Chinese railroad line from the Japanese advance. Liu would spend most of the war, however, not at the front but in the temporary Chinese capital of Chongqing.
In Chongqing, the international department of the Kuomintang government produced its radio broadcasts, intended to provide listeners throughout Asia with news about the war. Liu was tasked with presenting the broadcast in Dutch and German. The international department had little equipment to work with and lacked a soundproof studio. Thus, during the news coverage, even the sound of quacking ducks and barking dogs could be heard in the background. Despite the makeshift conditions, the intended audience was still reached. When Liu returned to the Netherlands, he was approached by survivors of Japanese concentration camps in the Dutch East Indies; they recognized his voice from the radio broadcasts they had secretly listened to.
When World War II ended and the power struggle between the Chinese nationalists and communists resumed, Liu remained loyal to the Kuomintang. He vehemently opposed the Chinese Communists because of their religious intolerance. In 1948, Liu transferred to the Navy and underwent navigation training. After being sent on a mission to the Zhoushan Archipelago, he was told that his family had been evacuated to the southern Taiwanese city of Zuoying. Liu was ordered to move there as well. Although he could never have imagined it at the time, Liu would never set foot on the Chinese mainland again and would call Zuoying his home for the rest of his life.
The patriot of Ziqiang New Village
Liu and his family settled in Ziqiang New Village, a village for military personnel in Zuoying in Kaohsiung. Similar villages, consisting of single-story houses, were hastily built all over Taiwan in the years following World War II to house thousands of Chinese military personnel and their families.
In Zuoying, Liu quickly made a name for himself as vice director of the local cinema. Liu’s strict behavior in the cinema made him a legendary figure in the region. He made visitors sing patriotic songs before entering the cinema and loudly reprimanded those who did not follow the rules. Visitors who tried to smuggle snacks or betel nuts into the cinema were similarly treated and turned away. Liu applied his strict discipline to all visitors, regardless of rank or status. Although this justice earned him the frustration of senior officers, it made him popular among ordinary villagers.
Not only did Liu’s strictness stand out in Zuoying, but also his patriotism. If Liu noticed that people did not fly the flag on national holidays, he would knock on their doors and admonish them for not being patriotic enough. No matter how patriotic Liu was, he remained a foreigner in the eyes of his fellow villagers in Zuoying. Liu’s mother’s warning proved prophetic. Yet Liu felt Chinese through and through. When someone called him Dutch or told him to use the facilities for foreign visitors, Liu sternly replied that he was Chinese.
Return to the Low Countries
Shortly after retiring from the Navy, Liu returned to the Netherlands in 1962 for the first time in decades to administer his late mother’s estate. This visit became a press trip of sorts to promote the cause of Taiwan (ROC; Republic of China) to the Dutch public. Liu appeared in several newspaper and magazine articles. He was quoted on how he had come to China and why the situation in Taiwan was crucial to the free world. He was also featured in a television report on Taiwan.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Liu spent several years in the Netherlands and Belgium, serving the Kuomintang. During that time, he monitored Chinese shipping to the Low Countries and provided Dutch news sources with (anonymous) pro-ROC reports.
Initially, the pro-ROC lobby, of which Liu was a part, aimed to gain support from the general public by publishing pro-Kuomintang information and stirring up diplomatic scandals with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). After it became clear that this strategy was not working, the goal shifted to building and improving economic ties between the Netherlands and Taiwan. This strategy was much more successful and allowed Dutch companies, including Philips, to flourish in Taiwan. To this day, the Netherlands and Taiwan are important trading partners.
Liu returned to Taiwan in early 1976 and continued to work for the authorities because of his deep knowledge of both Chinese and European cultures and customs; an “intercultural communicator” as we would call that role today.
Throughout his long life, Yuan-tao Liu never renounced his love for Chinese culture and the ideals he had championed from a young age. He died in 2001 at the age of 90.
Simeon Vonk is a sinologist, historian, and biographer of Willem van Lennep aka Liu Yuan-tao. He works for Nuffic as an expert on Asian education systems.
This article is a summary from the book “Since 1624 – Taiwanese-Dutch Connections. Click here for more information about the other chapters. To purchase the book, click here.
