Jozef Mullie was a product of the Flemish priest, poet and teacher Cesar Gezelle. Gezelle instilled in his pupil a passion for language, which he would carry with him for the rest of his life. On 7 September 1903, Mullie joined the CICM society, and when he completed his missionary training, he had already taught himself nearly every language between old Gothic and Mongolian.
In 1909, Mullie arrived in Northwest China, in the area known to missionaries as the "vicariate of Eastern Mongolia". Here Mullie began his missionary career as a vicar to the parish of Father Heyns in Dayingzi, Bārin. With the help of the Mongolian community living near his parish, Mullie improved on his knowledge of spoken Mongolian.
Two years later, Mullie was transferred to Hata, where he was appointed as the director of the CICM secondary school. Taken by his teaching obligations, Mullie abandoned Mongolian and invested all his time and energy in the scientific study of the Chinese spoken language. On thousands of cards, Mullie noted every detail of the Chinese dialect spoken in Eastern Mongolia: the grammatical use of the words, peculiar constructions, proverbs, even the position of the tongue, lips and teeth.
In 1930, the first results of Mullie's painstaking work were published by the Lazarist Press in Peking as "Het Chineesch Taaleigen" (first of three volumes, written in Dutch and translated as "The structural principles of the Chinese language : an introduction to the spoken language, Northern Pekingese dialect").
Mullie's most significant contribution to sinology was his discovery of the tombs of three of the emperors of the 11th century Liao dynasty. Careful study of the historical sources of the Song dynasty and contemporary geographical evidence, enabled Mullie to locate the tombs with virtual certainty. Mullie's reports were published in the leading sinological journal of that period, T'oung Pao in 1922 and 1933. Unfortunately, the tombs were looted by robbers; the little that was left either disappeared or still awaits identification in the CICM China collections in Belgium.
In 1926, Mullie moved to the provincial capital, and former summer residence of the Manchu emperors, Chengde or "Jehol". Mullie's knowledge of the language and customs made him the Church's interlocutor with the civil authorities. On 19 June 1930, the provincial governor appointed him to the famine relief committee of the province. When the famous Swedish explorer Sven Hedin visited Chengde, it was Mullie who provided him with all help needed to carry out his work on the old imperial capital of Jehol.
After more than two decades of missionary and scholarly labour in China, Mullie was summoned back to Belgium. Mullie first headed for the port-city of Tianjin with the remains of the CICM founder, which he shipped back to Belgium, along with his personal library of 1,400 Chinese and 3,000 western-language books. Mullie himself then returned to Belgium by the Transsiberian railway.
Back in Belgium, Mullie was assigned to teach his young fellow-missionaries spoken and literary Chinese. In 1939, academic recognition came when Mullie was appointed to the chair of Chinese language and literature at the University of Utrecht, Holland.
Mullie spent the final years of his life as the unofficial librarian to the East Asian library of the University of Leuven. Following the relocation of the French-language section of Leuven university in the 1970s, the entire Chinese and Japanese collection was transferred to the newly built French-language campus of Leuven University ("Louvain-la-Neuve"). Mullie's books remained in Leuven and became the nucleus of the present East-Asian Library.
Mullie left an impressive collection of papers, including a set of detailed diaries, with first-hand reports on war-torn China of the 1920s, hundreds of letters to scholars, diplomats and Chinese officials, and materials on the beginnings of sinology as an academic discipline in Belgium.
Most papers and archival materials related to Mullie are now kept by the Katholieke Documentatiecentrum (KADOC) in Leuven. Entries to these and the Mullie holdings in the Memorial Library are constantly being updated and can be searched through the Leuven University on-line Library catalogue. |
