a publishing house run by Gérard Lebovici. For his PhD thesis, Ryckmans chose to translate and comment on a masterpiece of the history of Chinese art, the treatise on painting by Shitao. It was published in 1970 by the Institut Belge des Hautes Etudes Chinoises in Brussels, under the title Propos sur la peinture du moine Citrouille-amère de Shitao. Contribution à l'étude terminologique des théories chinoises de la peinture. On his publisher's advice, he decided to assume a pen name to avoid being declared persona non grata in the People's Republic of China. He chose "Simon" as his first name, a reference to the original name of the Apostle Peter, and "Leys" as his second name, a tribute to the main character of Victor Segalen's René Leys published in 1922, in which a Belgian teenager residing in Peking in the final days of the Qing Dynasty entertains his employer with accounts of the intrigues and conspiracies taking place behind the walls of the imperial palace. It is also suggested that his nom de plume is an allusion to a dynasty of painters from Antwerp under the name of Leys, with Henri Leys as its most famous representative. In 1970 Ryckmans settled in Australia and he taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he supervised the honours thesis of future Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. He returned to China in 1972 for six months as a cultural attaché for the Belgian Embassy in Beijing. In 1983 Ryckmans appeared on the literary talk show Apostrophes on French television. The host, Bernard Pivot, had also invited Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, a "China expert" and author of the book Dalla Cina. After the latter had waxed lyrical on the subject of the New China, Ryckmans responded ferociously, pointing out errors of fact that suggested she had not verified her sources before writing her book, a work that he judged as being "d'une stupidité totale" (totally stupid) or "une escroquerie" (a fraud). In the period 1987–93 he was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney. He took early retirement, later explaining that, near the end, "deep modifications" had begun to affect universities in Australia and worldwide, "transformations ... progressively taking the university further away from the model to which I had originally devoted my life". Following his retirement he returned to Canberra, where he lived for the remainder of his life.