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NLA News - home November 2004 Volume XV Number 2

Otto van der Sprenkel
Chinese Historian, Book Lover and Library Benefactor

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Otto van der Sprenkel and assistants working at the National Library on his bibliography of Western language works about China, c.1970
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-vn3259515

Andrew Gosling reveals how Otto van der Sprenkel’s great love of Chinese civilisation lives on in the historian’s fine gifts to the National Library

Otto van der Sprenkel (1906–1978) had a long and close relationship with the National Library of Australia. He had the distinction of holding reader’s ticket no. 2, just ahead of Manning Clark and A.D. Hope and advised on major Asian purchases, such as the London Missionary Society and the Walter Simon collections. For many years he worked in the Library on his bibliography of Western language publications about China. Otto donated rare European and Chinese books, including one of the oldest Asian printed items ever to enter the collection. A further 600 volumes in Chinese were acquired from his personal library.

Former students still pride themselves on remembering his full name, Otto Pierre Nicholas Berkelbach van der Sprenkel. He might have been amused to know that a recent British university reading guide on the Internet listed his Chinese Civil Service (1957) as being by two authors, Otto van der Sprenkel and P.N. Berkelbach.

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Otto van der Sprenkel, March 1966
Manuscript Collection, MS 3050/2/5

Otto was born in the Netherlands, but raised in England, where he gained a First Class Honours degree at the London School of Economics. He became an active member of the left-wing intellectual Fabian Society as an undergraduate. From 1931 to 1933 he was a lecturer in political science at the University Toronto. The following year he returned to England and lectured for the Workers Educational Association. In 1943 he became a student of Chinese and part-time lecturer in history at the School Oriental and African Studies, University London.

Late in 1947 he was appointed visiting professor at Nankai University in Tianjin (Tientsin) where he remained during the latter stages of the Chinese civil war and communist victory in 1949. He wrote about this turbulent time as joint author of the book New China: Three Views (1950). In it he described how the main university campuses were evacuated during the siege of the city. Nationalist troops moved in ‘to loot them clean … My own house in North Campus was most scientifically dealt with. When I returned after the siege I found that even the front door had been stolen’.

Back at the School of Oriental and African Studies during the early 1950s, he began to publish articles on the then largely neglected field of Ming Dynasty history (1368–1644), which he continued after moving to Canberra. The eminent scholar Wang Gungwu later described him as the pioneer of Ming studies in Australia.

Otto accepted the post of Senior Lecturer in Oriental Civilization at the Canberra University College late in 1956. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1960 when the college amalgamated with the Australian National University, and continued in this position until his retirement in 1971.

Late in 1964 Otto suffered a heart-attack and spent a month in hospital. While recovering at home he kept a diary, which is now housed among his papers at the Library. Though they only cover the first few weeks of 1965, the entries reveal much about his life and interests. He and his wife Pamela had moved into their new house in the suburb of Turner near the university. ‘All is light and sunshine, and the colour of grass, trees and flowers is seen through every door and window’, he wrote on 1 January. Though far from well, he was reading voraciously. The diary is full of comments on books of all kinds. He took delight in the letters of Voltaire in the original French, but found Edna O’Brien’s latest novel ‘most depressing’. He was busy organizing his new study and library. On 28 January he wrote, ‘Later on Mr Blackstone arrived with the new bookcase he has made for the hallway, and installed it most efficiently. It looks very well, and I have now filled its ten narrow shelves with our disgracefully large collection of paperback thrillers, SF stories, etc.’. Friends and colleagues came to discuss academic work, to chat or play bridge. He was also enjoying his J.S. Bach records, and cricket on the television but not the new BBC serial Dr Who, in Otto’s words ‘an idiot who should never have been trusted with a time machine’.

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Barbara Robinson?
[Portrait of Otto van der Sprenkel]  [c.1946]
oil on masonite; 87.0 x 68.5 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an5692892
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Otto’s portrait on the wall of his home
Manuscript Collection, MS 3050/2/5

As an undergraduate in Otto’s Modern Chinese History class in 1969, I recall his wit and love of words. He introduced us to ‘rebarbative’, meaning repellent, from the French for beard. This was no doubt aimed at those of us with the scruffy facial hair fashionable at the time. When our essays were long he quoted ‘better less but better’. We were invited to dinner at his house, where he held forth on the merits of the Belgian detective writer Georges Simenon, creator of Maigret, but we were then expected to listen in silence to his Bach records.

Though he had not received a religious upbringing, Otto developed a strong interest in theology. He joined the Society of Friends, or Quakers, as an adult in England and remained an active member in Canberra. He gave the Society’s 1973 James Backhouse Lecture, published as Friends and Other Faiths. In it, he described the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light or ‘God’s in-dwelling in every member of the human race’ as ‘throwing out bridges’ to other beliefs and philosophies, such as Confucianism and Zen Buddhism. He saw similarities between the Quakers’ optimistic view of human nature and the Chinese Confucian philosopher Mencius, who taught that everyone is born with a potential for goodness.

From 1964, and almost to the end of his life, Otto laboured on a major guide to publications about China. He called it ‘A Selective and Annotated Bibliography of Chinese History, Thought and Society to 1965 in Western Languages (Excluding Russian)’. It was a most ambitious undertaking as he sought to cover all important books and journal articles on China in these languages. He based the bibliography on book reviews and library catalogues, searching thousands of serial volumes for suitable articles and reviews. While compiling the list he spent much time at the National Library, where he and his research assistants were allocated a special study room. When I began work at the Library in 1973 I recall Otto often joined the Orientalia staff for morning tea in the canteen, where he always seemed jovial and full of anecdotes.

Unfortunately he did not live to complete his bibliography, but the typescript draft in 21 bound red volumes is housed in Manuscripts, where it is available for reference. A duplicate copy is at the Australian National University Library. The arrangement is by broad subject heading: History and Geography; Society; Thought; and Sinology. These categories are further subdivided. Otto’s annotations vary from two lines to abstracts a page long, often including quotations from reviews.

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Preface reproduced from Xu Zi Zhi Tong Jian Gang Mu (Continuation of the Abridged Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government), and dated 1476. This rare book from the Ming Dynasty was donated to the National Library by Professor Otto van der Sprenkel
Asian Collections, OCRB 2512 2333 f

Paul Rule of La Trobe University, Melbourne and the Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco is currently completing Otto’s bibliography and preparing it for publication on the Internet. He hopes to have much of it accessible online soon. The complete work will be far more extensive than the copies of the draft version held at the National Library and the Australian National University.

In October 1968 the National Librarian, Sir Harold White, wrote to thank Otto for a gift of rare books, which included what remains one of the oldest imprints in the Library. Its preface is dated 1 December 1476. Housed in the Asian Collections strongroom, the Ming Dynasty Chinese work is entitled Xu Zi Zhi Tong Jian Gang Mu. It may be translated as Continuation of the Abridged Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government. The title requires some explanation: Sima Guang, the Song Dynasty statesman, completed a history of China in 1085, calling it ‘The Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government’. The Chinese traditionally viewed history as a mirror or guide to good government in the present age. In the twelfth century, the famous Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi produced a reworked version, ‘The Abridged Comprehensive Mirror’, which gave greater emphasis to the moral lessons of history. Finally, the historian Shang Lu (1414–1486), directing a team of 14 colleagues, was commanded to compile a continuation of Zhu Xi’s work. It is this extremely rare work, published by the Ming Palace Press, which Otto presented to the Library. It consists of 32 volumes in four cases, has been carefully repaired and is in good condition.

Igor de Rachewiltz of the Australian National University has said that Otto’s generosity to friends and colleagues is epitomised by his many gifts, and long-term loans of precious books which ended up as gifts.

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Pamela van der Sprenkel, March 1966
Manuscripts Collection, MS 3050/2/5

In 1972 the Library acquired an important set of Chinese language works from Otto. Exactly 133 titles in 636 volumes were purchased. The Otto van der Sprenkel Collection is one of a number of private libraries on Asia acquired from scholars and book lovers between the 1950s and 1980s. They are the foundation on which the collection has been built. Around half of Otto’s books are on Chinese history, but there are also works on many other subjects, including literature, society, classics, philosophy and religion. Most titles date from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and neatly complement the Library’s own collecting of Chinese language publications which did not begin until the 1950s. There are also several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts on Chinese history and philosophy.

The Otto van der Sprenkel Collection has been fully catalogued online as part of a major effort to improve access to retrospective Chinese holdings. Before this project, which began in 2000, many older Chinese books could only be found through brief title entries in the card catalogue. Collections such as Otto’s have been integrated into the main Chinese monograph run; a keyword search under ‘Sprenkel’ in the online catalogue brings together all its titles.

In 1987, Otto’s widow Pamela donated a large oil painting of her husband and a set of off-prints he had collected on Chinese subjects, many signed by their authors, to the Library. The picture of Otto aged about 40 remains rather a puzzle. It has been suggested that it was executed in France by the British artist Barbara Robinson in about 1946. However, Sybille van der Sprenkel, who was married to Otto until 1962, corresponded with the Library in 1988 querying where, when and by whom it was painted. She remembered a 1948 study by a Chinese artist of Otto wearing a yellow open-necked shirt, but thought it was lost during the siege of Tianjin. At any rate the portrait of Otto in a blue shirt and tie looked down from the wall of my office into the Asian Collections Reading Room for many years.

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Otto’s memorial plate with the inscription ‘Otto P.N. Berkelbach van der Sprenkel, 1906–1978 held in loving memory’
Manuscript Collection, MS 3050/2/5

Otto’s greatest scholarly contribution was almost certainly as an exceptional teacher. Though he only taught briefly in Toronto in the 1930s, he is acknowledged as a major influence on the leading Canadian political scientist, C.B. Macpherson (1911–1987). After Otto’s death, Macpherson wrote to Pamela, ‘whatever success I have as a political theorist owes its start to the enthusiasm with which he then infected me … he made [political theory] come alive with an intellectual acumen and an immediacy, to a degree unequalled in all my subsequent experience’. Otto was remembered by his distinguished former doctoral student in London during the 1950s, Jerome Chen, as ‘tall and dark, slightly on the heavy side, extremely erudite and witty’. In dedicating a book to his mentor, Chen wrote ‘From Otto I not only learnt modern Chinese history but also cricket as we had spent many happy hours of discussion on the state economic policies of the late Ch’ing while watching James Laker and Denis Compton at the consecrated MCC headquarters known to all as Lords’. During his later years at the Australian National University, as Igor de Rachewiltz has written, ‘His lectures on Chinese history combined wide knowledge and interpretation, and inspired a whole generation of younger Australian scholars’.

Another colleague at the Australian National University, John Caiger, wrote that in Otto van der Sprenkel ‘Canberra gained a man of culture, of books and ideas’. The National Library and its readers have certainly benefitted from these aspects of Otto’s life and work in Australia.

ANDREW GOSLING was Chief Librarian, Asian Collections from 1985 to 2003. He has written extensively on Asian collections and services in Australia.

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