Robert van Gulik (1910 – 1967) was a learned Sinologist, a diplomat who finished his career as the Netherlands’ ambassador to Japan, a connoisseur of Ming dynasty erotica, a performer on the Chinese lute, an authority on gibbons, and a devotee of Chinese detective stories, especially those featuring Judge Dee, a historical figure from the seventh century CE whom later Chinese writers fictionalized as a paramount solver of crimes—the country’s Sherlock Holmes, as it were.  Not content with all his other activities, van Gulik also wrote (in English) his own Judge Dee novels, seventeen of them, and illustrated most of them with woodcuts in the Chinese style.  Here is a typical illustration, which seems to bring together at least two of van Gulik’s interests:

Source: www.pinterest.com

In The Willow Pattern, from 1965, we read of Judge Dee’s lieutenant Ma Joong going out into the city to gather information.  In a low wine tavern Ma encounters an itinerant puppet-master and his pet monkey, the former with a grudge against the upper classes:

     “Have a good look at how people live there, soldier!  In dark, damp slums, in abandoned cellars, half underground.  Yet I prefer those to the fine houses of the rich.  Any time!”  Scratching the furry back of the monkey, he added pensively: “The poor are always busy trying to fill their stomachs, too busy to think up cruel pastimes to whet their jaded appetites.  Like the richards do, in the large house behind us!”  He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder.

The word “richard,” which the puppet-master uses in the plural, presumably meaning by it “rich people,” appears in dictionaries like the OED, but only with obsolete or rare meanings, and meanings radically different from “rich people,” i.e., “a variety of apple,” “a detective or private eye” (i.e., a “dick,” in American hard-boiled usage), and “a girl” (in British slang). 

When does a word become real, an actual unit of the language (see aptronym)?  When it’s used by more than one person, would be one criterion, and as far as I can tell “richards” in the “rich people” sense appears nowhere outside page 23 of The Willow Pattern.  In other words, “richards” is van Gulik’s coinage and probably his mistake, something he thought was an English word along the lines of “dullards” or “sluggards.”   If it wanted to, the OED could add “richard” to its “List of Spurious Words,” a rich trove of misspellings, misprintings, misunderstandings, mondegreens, and other evidences of human fallibility.  If you look the list up, check out “curriedew,” “galverly,” and “momblishness.”  Yet another non-existent word, not appearing even in the OED’s list, is “dord,” which as the linguist David Crystal relates resulted from a misreading of the label for a word which could be spelled either capitalized or lower-case, that is, “D or d.”      

That “richards” is an error does not really take anything away from van Gulik’s linguistic attainment, which was remarkable.  Besides classical Chinese, he knew Sanskrit, Japanese, Indonesian, French, and German, in addition to his native Dutch and to English, the language he chose to write his fiction in.  The Judge Dee books are expressive, occasionally eloquent, and nearly always completely idiomatic, besides being cleverly plotted and fascinating about old China.  I think their author may be allowed a mistake or two.