DE GROOT Johann Jacob Maria (EN)

Biographical article

Born into a fervent Catholic family, Johann Jacob Maria de Groot (Schiedam, 18/2/185424/9/1921, Berlin) was the fourth of thirteen children in the family of Johann Seraphin Matthias de Groot (1824–1912), a merchant and liquor dealer, and Helena Wilhelmina Elisabeth Beukers (1830–1920) (AM (municipal archives), Schiedam, 21 February 1854, 79).

Fascinated since his childhood by the tales of the sea voyages of the officer and writer Frederick Marryatt (1792–1848), de Groot initially wanted to become an officer in the Dutch Royal Navy (Groot, J. J. M. de, Notizen über mein Leben). But his successive failures in the entry exams obliged him to take a different path. At first, he enrolled at the governmental school of Delft to become a colonial public servant of the Dutch East India Company, then spent three years in the University of Leiden (Werblowsky, Z., 2002, p. 15; Kuiper, K., 2017, pp. 331–332). He trained as a Chinese interpreter with Gustave Schlegel (1840–1903), who had himself trained in China in the 1860s and worked as an interpreter for the Supreme Court of the colonial government of Batavia. Different in character to his teacher, de Groot was quite critical of him several years later (Werblowsky, Z., 2002, p. 16; Kuiper, K., 2017, p. 349). During this period of training, he also distanced himself from the Catholic Church, which he considered too intransigent (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 2).

A first stay in Asia (1876–1883)

On 11 December 1876, de Groot left the Netherlands to complete his last year of practical Chinese studies. He arrived in Amoy (present-day Xiamen), in the province of Fujian, in south-east China, on 2 February 1877 (de Groot, J. J. M. de, Notizen; Kuiper, K., 2017, p. 479). In 1842, Amoy was one of five ports that opened to foreigners after the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) after the first opium war and soon became one of the centres of the Western presence in Southern China. He spent one year studying the living language and local dialect of Fujian, to collect data about the life and popular cults, and study the Buddhist monastic system. He later destroyed this field notebook and only kept the scientific data that were eventually published (de Groot, J. J. M. de, Notizen; Visser, 1921, p. 2; Werblowsky, Z., 2002, p. 34; Kuiper, K., 2017, p. 484). This training was extremely useful as the colonial administrators needed many interpreters to deal with a large population of Chinese émigrés from Fujian who were seeking work in the East Indies (present-day Indonesia).

On 9 February 1878, he left Amoy for Canton, Singapore, and then he was appointed as an interpreter at Cheribon (the present-day city of Cirebon, in Java) on the northern coast of Java (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 3). He used this period to work on his field notes before leaving for Pontianak, on the Island of Borneo, to take care of his health. De Groot was isolated in the Dutch community, whose way of life he did not share (Groot, J. J. M. de, Notizen). He continued with his study, and in 1881 managed to publish the first part of his studies into the Jaarlijksche feesten en gebruiken van de Emoy-Chineezen (the annual feasts and customs ofthe Amoy Chinese, Batavia, 1881) (Werblowsky, Z., 2002, pp. 19–22).

In March 1883, he was forced by health issues to return to the Netherlands. He published the second part of his work on the feasts, as well as a study of the Kongsi system or ‘clan house’ that brought together the Chinese of the diaspora in Borneo (Het Kongsiwezen an Borneo, 1885).

Living in The Hague, he prepared a speech about Buddhist funerary masses for the Congrès des Orientalistes in Leiden in September 1883 (Actes du sixième Congrès international des orientalistes, 1885). Here he met Émile Guimet (1836–1918), an industrialist and founder of a museum of religions in Lyon in 1879, who suggested that he publish an illustrated edition of the ‘Feasts’ in the Annales du Musée Guimet. César Gustave Chavannes (1832–1909) translated and adapted the text from the Dutch with the writer, and the work was illustrated by the painter Félix Régamey (1844–1907). The two hefty volumes were published two years later (Les Fêtes annuellement célébrées à Emoui (Amoy). Étude concernant la religion populaire des chinois, 1886, pp. 403–832). This work earned him a doctorate at the University of Leipzig (5 December 1884), and was acknowledged in Sinology circles (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 4; Werblowsky, Z., 2002, p. 19).

The objects collected during his first stay were donated to the Ethnography Museum in Leiden and he sold the works purchased at Amoy to the University of the same city (Kuiper, K., 2017, p. 1003).

A second stay in China (June 1886–April 1890)

Wishing to pursue his sinological research during a second stay, de Groot managed to convince the Dutch Ministry of Colonies to entrust him with a two-year renewable study mission. After much discussion, he was granted permission on 8 May 1885, with as a research subject the languages, geography, and ethnology of China (Kuiper, K., 2017, pp. 404–412). He stayed in Leiden for two months to learn about photography and produce preparatory studies. En route to Marseille, he stopped in Lyon to meet Émile Guimet and visit his museum (Werblowsky, Z., 2002, p. 24). On this occasion, and based on a proposition by de Groot, Guimet entrusted him with compiling a scientific collection relating to Chinese popular religions to enrich his museum (Guimet, E., 1913. p. 95). He left Marseille in January 1886, passing by Batavia, and his journey took him to Delhi, Canton, Hong Kong, and lastly Amoy, where he arrived in June 1886 (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 4; Werblowsky, Z., 2002, p. 55).

His second stay in China was extremely fruitful. He collected many details about family life—inheritance, adoption, the status of women, and marriage—and funerary ceremonies, which he carefully observed and recorded. Consequently, he often stayed with Chinese families and attended the religious festivals held by the population to gain a better understanding of them. He stayed in Buddhist monasteries to study monastic life. He travelled to China’s southern provinces, not without some difficulty, due to the climate and mistrust of the population vis-à-vis foreigners (Groot, J. J. M. de, 1892, p. 9; Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 5).

At the same time, he organised the emigration of Chinese coolies towards the Island of Bangka and the Eastern coast of Sumatra (Groot, J. J. M. de, Notizen; Werblowsky, Z., 2002, p. 50).

On 30 January 1888, his sojourn was prolonged by two years. At the time he worked on monastic consecration and in 1888 he was awarded two prizes that attested to the interest engendered by his work in Europe. France awarded him the Légion d’Honneur on 6 January 1888 for his collaboration with the Musée Guimet (Groot, J. J. M. de, Notizen; Werblowsky, Z., 2002, pp. 64–66), and the Netherlands made him a correspondent member of the Royal Academy of Science in Amsterdam. In April and May 1889, he stayed for the last time in the monastery of Kushan near Fuzhou, to study certain aspects of Chinese Buddhism that were still obscure (Groot, J. J. M. de, Notizen; Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 6).

In January 1890, he accepted the offer of an appointment as a teacher of Chinese and Malaysian at the Amsterdam Business School and returned to the Netherlands. He travelled through Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, and its environs, and he visited many monasteries and pagodas, as well as the mausoleum of the emperors of the Ming Dynasty, which he measured, described, and photographed (Groot, J. J. M. de, The Religious System of China, 1894 and 1897; Visser M. W. de, 1921, p. 6).

When he arrived in Japan, he visited Nagasaki, Kyoto, and Tokyo and attended several festivals in temples. He left Yokohama for America and England and finally returned to his native land. He never went back to Asia (Visser, 1921, p. 6; Kuiper, K., 2017, pp. 862–865).

The return to the Netherlands (1891–1911)

His stay in Amsterdam was very brief, because in October 1891 he was appointed Professor of Geography and Ethnology at the University of Leiden, succeeding Professor G. A. Wilken (1847–91) (Kuiper, K., 2017, p. 1004). At the time, he published scientific treatises in the international Sinology journal T'oung Pao, as well as articles on the legal status of Chinese emigrants and on Chinese consular policy (Groot, J. J. M. de, 1892a, 1892b, and 1892c). From 1891 to 1904, he worked as a professor of ethnology and then took over Gustave Schlegel’s position as Chair of Chinese until 1911 (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 9).

As he was still unmarried, De Groot lived at the time with two of his sisters, who managed everyday and secretarial matters. He continued his research into the Chinese religious system. The material collected during his travels was edited, explained, and complemented by an in-depth study of the sources of his rich Chinese library. In April 1892, the first part of his major work entitled The Religious System of China was published. The initial work was going to comprise twice as many parts, but only six were ultimately published. This innovative work contained a mine of information, not only in relation to sinology, but also ethnology and comparative religious history (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, pp. 7–8). The Prix Stanislas Julien, awarded each year by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres de l’Institut de France, in Paris, for the finest work on China published that year, was awarded twice for this work, in 1898 and 1902 (Jugement des concours, 1898. pp. 753–767; Palmarès des prix et récompenses décernés, 1902, pp. 588–603).

In 1892, he became a member of the Royal Academy of Science in Amsterdam, the Dutch Literary Society, and the Society of the University of Utrecht (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 8). He also gave several lessons to Queen Wilhelmina and the Queen Mother of the Netherlands between January 1899 and August 1900 (Werblowsky, Z., 2002, p. 26).

In 1902, the University of Columbia in America and the University of Berlin offered him a post as director of a Chair of Sinology. After an interview in Germany and much hesitation over this very tempting proposition, which was complemented by numerous advantages for his research, he eventually turned down the offer and remained in the Netherlands.

In December 1903, he became a correspondent member of the Chinese branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai, and he became president of the Far-Eastern Section of the International Orientalist Congress in Algiers in April–May 1905, then foreign associate member of the Société Asiatique de Paris (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 9).

In 1904, and again in 1911, he protested against the tradition of hazing young students. Initially, he was ignored and heavily criticised, but his intervention eventually led to some progress made with the issue. The rumours about de Groot’s homosexuality, contested by certain historians such as Zwi Werblowsky, may have originated from the time when de Groot created a scandal during a theatrical representation that highlighted homosexual practises used in hazing (Mungello, D. E., 2012, p. 77).

From 14 March to 16 May 1908, he travelled for the first time to America, where he held eight conferences at Hartford about Chinese religion. The same year, he attended the Congresses of Copenhagen and Oxford and was appointed correspondent member of the Institut de France. His second journey to America (24 September–30 December 1910) was made on the invitation of the American Committee for Lectures on the History of Religions, and he gave six conferences in Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Chicago. He was invited to go to America for the third time in 1911, and was made a Doctor Honoris Causa in Princeton on 13 June (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 11).

Departure for Germany in 1912

He received a second offer from Berlin on 25 May 1911. The proposed teaching conditions were certainly advantageous, but most importantly this proposition occurred at a time when de Groot was combating, on the one hand, the practices of hazing and, on the other, the University, which was refusing to create a post for the Iranian specialist Joseph Marquart (1864–1930). The Chair of Iranian philology was established in Berlin for Marquart and resulted in de Groot leaving the Netherlands, despite attempts by the University and the Ministry to make him change his mind. It was not until 1919 that he was replaced by a former pupil, J. J. L. Duyvendak (Blussé, L., 2014, p. 30).

He left in 1912 and became a lecturer at the Friedrich Wilhelms Universität (today, the University Humboldt) in Berlin, then a member of the Royale Academy. The German Emperor appointed him Königlicher Geheimer Regierungsrat (secret adviser to the royal government) and during the war de Groot unreservedly supported the German side. In 1914, he joined in with the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, signing a propaganda document with the title Aufruf an die Kulturwelt, An die Kulturwelt ! Ein Aufruf (‘Appeal of German intellectuals to the civilised nations’), which protested against the accusations of barbarity made againstGermany at the beginning of the Great War. He also gave up half of his salary to contribute to the war effort and in 1918 the German Emperor bestowed on him the Merit Cross for War Aid (Verdienstkreuz für Kriegshilfe). Due to this, his Western colleagues distanced themselves from him. As De Groot was decidedly conservative, his respect for the monarchy and desire for order and discipline brought him closer to Wilhelm’s Germany (Werblowsky, Z., 2003, p. 31).

During his first years in Berlin, de Groot wrote about Asian history inspired by Chinese sources. The work Chinesische Urkunden zur Geschichte Asiens was finished in 1917, but the first volume was not published until 1921, the year of his death, and the second in 1926 (Werblowsky, Z., 2003, p. 103).

At the end of the war he continued his work in the field of Chinese religion and history and devoted himself to training his students, who included the sinologists Franz Kuhn (1884–1961) and Erich Haenisch (1880–1966) (Kuiper, K. 2017, p. 1006).

He died in his house in Berlin in 1921 following an illness. His German colleagues paid tribute to him (Visser, M. W. de, 1921, p. 14).

This article was based on several biographies. His most comprehensive necrology was that of his former pupil Marinus Willem De Visser (1875–1930), who in 1922 had access to his notebook and the memoirs of one of his sisters (Visser, M. W. de, 1921). In 1983, Zwi Werblowski (1924–2015), a specialist in comparative religions, complemented these biographies thanks to a diary found in 1972 and published in 2002, The Beaten Track of Science, The life and Work of J. J. M. de Groot. It viewed de Groot as the father of ethno-sinology. In 2013, Wilt L. Idema and Léonard Blussé, two historians specialising in China, studied the history of the founders of Chinese studies in the Netherlands, which included de Groot. More recently, in 2017, Koos Kuiper, a librarian at the University of Leiden, devoted part of his book about Dutch sinologists between 1854 and 1900 to de Groot, based on many archive documents. Lastly, in 2018, Egbert Fleuren devoted his thesis to the role and the influence of de Groot in the history of Netherlandish sinology.

The de Groot Collection

De Groot’s collection, as a whole, represents hundreds of objects distributed between Leiden in the Netherlands, Paris, and Lyon. The Leiden Collection comprised more generally ethnographic material (Werblowsky, Z., 2003, p. 53), whilst the collection in the French museums was exclusively religious (MNAAG, inventory of the collections in the Catalogue Général des Objects d’Art, undated; Musée des Confluences, archives, copy of the permanent loan statement relating to the transfer of de Groot’s collection from Paris to Lyon, 1913), and this was intended to put into effect Émile Guimet’s initial project to establish—in Lyon, then in Paris—, a library, a religious museum that would contain all the gods of India, China, Japan, Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire, and a language school (‘Catalogue des objects exposés’, 1880, pp. 1–2). Groot’s collection was full of string marionettes, costumes, musical instruments, opium pipes, utensils from a barber shop; as well as religious objects such as altars, ancestral tablets, amulets, and talismans, and a large pantheon of divinities: shen, gui, gods, spirits, phantoms, demons, ghosts, genies, arhats, immortals, and so on, in polychrome wood.

Upon his return from Asia in 1883, de Groot donated to the Musée d’Ethnographie and the library of the University of Leiden the objects and works he had collected (Kuiper, K., 2017, p. 1003). Three years later, he profited from his second stay to continue gathering ethnographic material and religious iconography for the Musée, but his bad relations with Lindor Serrurier (1846–1901), the director, made the project null and void (Werblowsky, Z., 2003, p. 18). Hence, he turned to the company Brill, which at the time specialised in books and Oriental antiquities, to collect the necessary funds. Ironically, several years later, the Musée de Leiden acquired the collection assembled by de Groot for the publisher Brill. It included eighty statues of divinities, along with prints, coffins, and a series of costumes, tablets, objects used by opium and tobacco smokers, musical instruments, marionettes, and children’s toys, which were published in the Catalogue des différentes collections ethnographiques provenant de Chine et appartenant à la maison E. J. Brill à Leide. This sale catalogue, which is believed to have been published in 1890, comprised several lots purchased by the museum between 1893 and 1896 (Werblowsky, Z., 2003, pp. 62–63).

In contrast, the good relations he had with Léon de Milloué, curator in the Musée Guimet in Lyon, encouraged him to propose this project to Émile Guimet himself. In a letter dated 8 November 1885, de Groot asked Léon de Milloué if ‘Monsieur Guimet would be inclined to profit from my stay in China in the interests of the museum. Would you be so kind as to inform him that if he wishes me to compile collections for him, I am entirely at his disposition?’ He reiterated this proposition in a letter dated 16 December 1885, in which he offered to come to Lyon (MNAAG, archives). He underlined the interest of such an inexpensive collection, for it was compiled and documented on site by a connoisseur of the places and customs and not by a passing traveller. Guimet accepted this offer, as he had not managed to form the basis of a Chinese collection, unlike the works he had brought back from Japan in 1876 (Werblowsky, Z., 2003, p. 73). Hence, he sent de Groot money to ship the crates from China (MNAAG, archives, de Groot’s letter on 7 November 1886; Guide illustré, 1913, p. 95).

The interesting thing about this collection is the way it was compiled. De Groot directly commissioned from the sculptors of divinities, replicas of statuettes from temples, which he was perfectly familiar with (Guide Illustré, 1913, p. 95). This approach and the coherence in the compilation of the collection were very different from the collections compiled after his. At no point did he behave like a collector or even an amateur of Asian art. A field researcher, he was not interested in the original and unique nature of the divinities or religious objects, but rather the role of these objects as evidence of social practices. For de Groot himself this collection ‘forms un uninterrupted chain that illustrates the most important aspects of Chinese religious life’ (De Groot, J. J. M., 1892, p. XV). This stance was qualified by his biographer, Zwi Werblowsky, because he saw this collection as functioning as a whole more like a photograph of a specific point in the history of China around a theme and a given place (Werblowsky, Z., 2003, p. 58). Unique in museums, the collection in Lyon comprises more than two hundred and fifty statuettes painted and coloured with natural pigments, and almost four hundred additional elements, including marionettes, musical instruments, ensembles with mannequins and religious objects that reproduce religious scenes, and lastly, temple furniture. These statuettes, good or bad spiritual entities, or both, mostly have labels on their bases or inscriptions behind the socle in a transcription of the language of Fujian—but do not match any current system—, which has enabled their identity to be established through patient investigative work carried out by Zwi Werlowski for more than ten years.

These objects were exhibited for a while in the rooms of the Musée Guimet in Paris before being almost entirely transferred on permanent loan in 1913 to Lyon’s new Musée Guimet when it was reopened (Guide Illustré, 1913, p. 95). The collection was described in the guides of 1897 and 1913, based on the notes sent by de Groot, which were subsequently destroyed or lost. Hence, they were exhibited there until 1955, the year when a hail storm destroyed the glass canopy in the museum’s main room. In 1968, the Musée Guimet in Lyon closed, the collections were packed into crates in the storerooms and ten years later they were added to the collection in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, and were housed together in the building. In 1983, part of the collection could be seen once again in the renovated room of Arts et Réligions, on the museum’s second floor. Its director, Louis David, and the curator of the ethnographic collections, Roland Mourer, patiently brought the collection to life with the help of two eminent sinologists: Anna Seidel, followed by Zwi Werblowski. A comprehensive catalogue of the statuettes (250) was published in 2004, after a long study carried out by Zwi Werblowski and a restoration campaign that lasted more than ten years (Werblowsky, Z., 2004). Part of the collection was exhibited in the museum in 2001 during the temporary exhibition ‘Trésors, chefs d’œuvres et quoi encore’, in 2004 and 2005 during the ‘Year of China’, and based on the work Dieux de Chine, which the museum devoted to this collection (Emmons, D., Werblowsky, Z., and Stevens, K., 2003). In 2013, during the retrospective exhibition of the artist Huang Yong Ping in the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, some of the statuettes were displayed in the centre of the exhibition area, at his request, in an installation that resembled a museum storeroom. In 2014, the temporary exhibition ‘Les Trésors de Guimet’ explored the history of the museum in Lyon and the exhibited collections, and since then a showcase has been presenting an extract of the pantheon of Chinese divinities in the permanent exhibition rooms of the Musée des Confluences.