"Judge Dee" is one of the great ancient Chinese detectives. He was a historical person, one of the well-known statesmen of the T'ang dynasty. His full name was Ti Jen-chieh, and he lived from A.D. 630 till 700. In his younger years, while serving as magistrate in the provinces, he acquired fame because of the many difficult criminal cases which he solved. It is chiefly because of his reputation as a detector of crimes that later Chinese fiction has made him the hero of a number of crime stories which have only very slight foundation in historical fact, if any.
Later he became a minister of the Imperial Court and through his wise counsels exercised a beneficial influence on affairs of state; it was because of his energetic protests that the Empress Wu, who was then in power, abandoned her plans to appoint to the throne a favorite instead of the rightful heir apparent.
In most Chinese detective novels the magistrate is at the same time engaged in the solving of three or more totally different cases. This interesting feature I have retained in the present novel, writing up the three plots so as to form one continuous story. In my opinion, Chinese crime novels in this respect are more realistic than ours. A district had quite a numerous population; it is only logical that often several criminal cases had to be dealt with at the same time.
I have adopted the custom of Chinese Ming writers to describe in their novels men and life as during the sixteenth century, although the scene of their stories is often laid several centuries earlier. The same applies to the illustrations, which reproduce customs and costumes of the Ming period rather than those of the T'ang dynasty. Note that at that time the Chinese did not smoke, neither tobacco nor opium, and did not wear the pigtail-which was imposed on them only after A.D. 1644 by the Manchu conquerors. The men wore their hair long and done up in a topknot. Both outdoors and inside the house they wore caps.
Chinese Sources
The solution of the Murder of the Magistrate was taken by me from one of the original Chinese Judge Dee stories, viz. that of the Poisoned Bride. This tale will be found in the Chinese novel Wu-tset'ien-szu-ta-ch'i-an, which I published in English translation under the title of Dee Goong An (Tokyo, 1949). There a bride is accidentally poisoned on the wedding night by the venom of an adder which nestled in the moldy rafter in the kitchen, above the spot where the tea water was always boiled. When the hot steam curled up, the adder would push its head out and release its venom into the water. I modified the plot, but borrowed unchanged the manner in which judge Dee discovers the truth, namely by observing dust fallen from the ceiling into his teacup (cf. Dee Goong An, page 159). Mr. Vincent Starrett has pointed out already in his excellent essay, "Some Chinese Detective Stories" (ín: Bookman's Holiday, Random House: New York, 1942) that this motif is reminiscent of Sir Conan Doyle's story "The Speckled Band," which was written at least a hundred years later.
The Korean element was suggested by Edwin O. Reischauer's stimulating study Ennin's Travels in T'ang China (New York, 1955). He brought to light, on the basis of the travel diary of a Japanese monk who visited China in the ninth century, the great importance of Korean shipping to T'ang Chinai and the existence of Korean settlements on the northeast coast which practically enjoyed extraterritoriality. The same source also proves how highly developed the Chinese bureaucratic system was already in the T'ang period. Travelers were checked and searched at frequent intervals along the highways, and one needed numerous official documents before one could move from one place to another.
The cases of the Bolting Bride and the Butchered Bully are based upon an occurrence described in the Ku-chin-ch'i-an-wei-pien (Shanghai, 19Z1), where in the seventh chapter a number of old cases are collected under the heading Wu-sha-ch'i-an "Curious Cases of Murder by Mistake." There it is said that the woman was wounded only slightly, and fled after the murderer had left, which doesn't sound very convincing. Therefore I introduced the element of the sickle, and rewrote the tale so as to fit in with the smuggling plot.
Ghosts and were-animals figure largely in Chinese fiction. Those interested in these occult subjects will find copious data in H. A. Giles, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (first edition: London, 1880; American edition: New York, 1925). Tigers still occur in fair numbers in Manchuria, and in the southern provinces of China. But Marco Polo tells us that in former times they occurred also in the northern provinces and often made traveling unsafe in those parts.
The progressive thoughts on the position of women voiced by judge Dee in Chapter XV of the present novel are not as anachronistic as they would seem. Since early times there have been Chinese writers who broke a lance for women and protested against masculine ethicsalthough it must be admitted that until the great movement for the emancipation of women initiated after the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912, those progressive views were not very favorably received by the general public. Cf., Lin Yü-t'ang's interesting essay "Feminist Thought in Ancient China," in his book Confucius Saw Nancy and Essays about Nothing (Commcrcial Press, Shanghai, 1936).
The third theater piece described in Chapter XVI, about the unequally divided property, I borrowed from the old casebook T'ang-yinpi-shih; there the solution is ascribed to the famous eleventh century imperial counsellor Chang Ch'i-hsien (Case 55-B). The entire casebook was published by me in English translation under the title T'angyin-pi-shih, Parallel Cases from under the Pear Tree, a 13th century manual of jurisprudence and detection (Sinica Leidensia Series, Volume X, Leiden, 1956).
Just as in the other volumes of judge Dee Mysteries, here also I tried to show on the illustrations aspects of Chinese domestic life that did not yet appear in the others. Thus in this volume the reader will find a picture of a simple bed (Chiao Tai on the flower boat), of a more elaborate bedstead (Tang's death) and of a Chinese smelt oven with a pair of bellows (judge Dee in the temple). This time also I modeled these pictures after Ming-dynasty book illustrations, and the naked women after erotic albums of the same period. It should be noted that ancient Chinese sexual taboos differ from ours in that while our classical fig leaf would have been completely incomprehensible to them, they objected very strongly to picturing the uncovered feet of women, which they considered as highly indecent. Although in recent years this view is becoming dated, I still thought it wise to conceal the naked feet of the women depicted in my novels, with a view to the Chinese-language versions of the series.
ROBERT VAN GULIK
About the Author
Robert van Gulik was born in the Netherlands in 1910. He was educated at the Universities of Leyden and Utrecht, and served in the Dutch diplomatic service in China and Japan for many years. His interest in Asian languages and art led him to the discovery of Chinese detective novels and to the historical character of Judge Dee, famous in ancient Chinese annals as a scholar-magistrate. Van Gulik subsequently began writing the Judge Dce series of novels that have so captivated mystery readers ever since. He died of cancer in 1967.
