PIERRE Ryckmans, the late Belgian Sinologist, was one of the greatest intellectuals ever to live in Australia. He was an extraordinarily gifted and decent human being, whose writing provides a luminous insight into Chinese culture and history, and into many aspects of the human condition. As an author, he bears comparison with George Orwell for the astringent clarity and moral courage of his thinking and writing. Yet in many ways he was a much bigger figure than Orwell.
Ryckmans went to China as a student and was captivated by the depth and beauty of its civilisation. He approached his subject as a scholar, but also with something of the wonder of a child — a key to the charm and beauty of much of his writing. He was one of first Western Sinologists to write with bitter, unsparing honesty about the horrors of Maoism in China, when others celebrated Chinese Communist Party rule, regarding it as a liberation. His classic Chinese Shadows is a bitter, desperate, unsparing lament for the shocking iconoclasm and cultural destruction which the communists had wrought in the name of the Cultural Revolution. Initially, Ryckmans was a student of art and his spirit was full of delight at the beauties he discovered. Ryckmans’s accessible and meaningful translation of the Analects of Confucius, for him the most influential book in human history, was wholly original and gave the work a contemporary rendition of the highest literary quality. Ryckmans wrote a wonderful novella, The Death of Napoleon, and became a trenchant critic of the way modern universities sacrificed so much of the inheritance which made universities genuine places of intellectual exchange.
He was a superb slayer of dragons and his views were almost entirely at odds with the zeitgeist. Ryckmans did not seek controversy; he told the truth without regard to its consequences. He was almost allergic to personal publicity. A devout Catholic, he cultivated a balance in his life: faith and intellect, spirit and body, strenuous exercise and deep scholarship. At The Australian we are proud that he often chose to write in our pages. We are deeply grateful that he spent his working life in Australia and that he came to love this country.
He was a superb slayer of dragons and his views were almost entirely at odds with the zeitgeist. Ryckmans did not seek controversy; he told the truth without regard to its consequences. He was almost allergic to personal publicity. A devout Catholic, he cultivated a balance in his life: faith and intellect, spirit and body, strenuous exercise and deep scholarship. At The Australian we are proud that he often chose to write in our pages. We are deeply grateful that he spent his working life in Australia and that he came to love this country.
