Adrian van Amstel holds a Masters degree in Physics from the University of Amsterdam and worked for more than twelve years as database analyst and programmer. Since 1991 he has been living in China, and is presently working as an English teacher at the Guangdong University of Finance and Economics in Guangzhou.
One of the reasons for going to China was his interest in Chinese culture and language. While studying Chinese in the early 1990s, he found that the usual arrangement of characters in standard dictionaries do not help a foreign student of the language with remembering and spotting differences between characters that look similar. When he found T.K. Ann's "Cracking the Chinese Puzzle", he realized that an other arrangement would be possible, and started work on an alternative system, which took about three months to complete. With this handwritten first version of the Chinese Character Dictionary - in fact a notebook - he went to Taiwan in 1994. During his stay on the island he became interested in the period of Dutch colonization of the island in the 17th century. Fascinated by the historical accounts and physical remains in the form of the ruins of the fortress Zeelandia he began to make plans to write an account of this almost forgotten period in the history of the Dutch East India Company.
In the year 2000 he decided to take a course in English language teaching to adults (CELTA), in order to be able to support himself and at the same continue to live in China and work on the character dictionary and on the book about the Dutch East India Company and Taiwan. Finally, in 2011 his book about Taiwan was published in Dutch under the title "Barbaren, Rebellen and Mandarijnen" (Barbarians, rebels and mandarins), and in the summer of 2016 the Chinese Character Dictionary and the Simplified Chinese Character Dictionary were published.
