The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik
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In the 18th century, Judge Di joined Judges Pao (Bao Zheng), Shih (Shi Shilun), and Peng as one of the admirably sharp-witted magistrates who were featured in the Chinese popular tradition of detective fiction. The principal vehicle of Di’s elevation to master investigator was the 18th century novel, Wu Tse-T’ien Ssu-Ta Ch’i-An (Four Important and Curious Cases from the Time of Empress Wu), the first half of which Robert van Gulik translated as Dee Goong An (pinyin: dí gōng àn). Modern scholars have expressed skepticism regarding the historical basis for either Di’s heroism as a high-level Tang loyalist in the capital or his early detective career as a low level magistrate. His career as a daring and successful detector of crimes might be an understandable back story invented to provide him with moral authority and to explain his ability to outwit the court of the Empress Wu. His character as covert and effective Tang loyalist in what was traditionally seen as Wu’s corrupt and illegitimate court may derive from the paucity of consistently high-minded officials at that court. The Empress had an impressive record of efficiently eliminating any high-minded opposition. By the time Di was called to Luoyang, the chief figures in her court were her creatures—her nephews and other relatives, time-servers, and attractive boys, all vying for her favor. The surviving members of the Tang party—including her two sons—were in exile. An imperial official who was secretly working against the Empress and her minions and for the legitimate Tang heirs was perhaps the only plausible hero. The 11th-century scholar-statesman, Fan Chung-yen, praised Di: “The greatness of Ti [Jen-chieh] alone is able to confront this task [i.e. the task of restoring order to the world]” (quoted in McMullan 2). Di did, on occasion, openly oppose the Empress’s inclinations or actions, but much of the opposition that legend credited him with was concealed.
For this second act of Di’s life, van Gulik, in the Postscripts to The Red Pavilion and Murder in Canton, recommends Lin Yutang’s, Lady Wu: A Novel. Judge Dee (Di Renjiay, in Lin’s transliteration) appears as a key figure in the final third of the novel. The narrator of Lady Wu is Li Shouli, the Prince of Bin. He is the son of Li Xian, the second son of Emperor Gaozong and the Empress Wu. Though Lin makes some gestures toward making the Empress a multi-dimensional character, Li Shouli clearly reinforces the traditional view of her as monstrous diversion from the legitimate Tang dynasty to which he belongs. Li praises Di as a “master-mind,” one who “knew when to speak and when not to speak” (196). Knowing “when not to speak” might serve to justify a great deal of apparent subservience. Thus Lin Yutang contrives to sustain the heroism of Judge Dee’s silent, undercover resistance to Wu Zetian’s usurpation during the second act of his life, serving as an eminent counselor to the self-proclaimed Empress.
The evidence in the historical record for the first act of Dee’s career as an openly honorable detector of crimes rests upon a single anecdote: “As deputy president of the Court of Justice in the late 670s, Ti was said to have pronounced, within the space of one year, on criminal charges facing no fewer than 17,000 individuals, ‘and there were no plaints of injustice’” (McMullen 3). Lin Yutang refers to this anecdote in Lady Wu: “Among the people he is more popularly known as the judge who invariably tracked down the criminal. As a judge who often went about in plain clothes to detect crime, he made the astounding record of always solving crime mysteries which had puzzled and frustrated other judges and magistrates. He was credited with clearing up seventeen thousand old cases, setting many innocent accused free” (197). Seventeen thousand criminal cases resolved with “no plaints of injustice” constitute a more than creditable judicial record, but, as historical evidence, they are nonetheless a very slender thread upon which to hang an identity. David McMullen concludes that Judge Di’s reputation as a detective is a late development, completely “irrelevant” to the actual Dí Rénjié (4). Nonetheless, a brief review of what is known about the life of the actual Dí Rénjié may be of some interest to readers of the Judge Dee novels.
Dí Rénjié was born in 630, during the reign of the Emperor Taizong (January 23, 599 – July 10, 649), the second emperor of the Tang Dynasty of China and celebrated as its co-founder. Di’s family came from Taiyuan, the capital and largest city of Shanxi province in north China, southwest of Beijing. His grandfather, Di Xiaoxu and his father, Di Zhixun, served as officials in the Tang bureaucracy. After passing the imperial examinations, Di served as a secretary at the prefectural government of Bian Prefecture (roughly modern Kaifeng, Henan). By 676, during the reign of Emperor Taizong’s son Emperor Gaozong (21 July 628–27 December 683), Di was serving as the secretary general at the supreme court. It was at this time he was reported to have resolved successfully the 17,000 criminal cases.
The actual ruler of China during Judge’s Dee’s fictional career as a district magistrate (663–678) was the third Tang emperor, Li Zhi, who reigned as Gaozong (= Kao-tsung) from 649 to his death in 683. Gaozong is generally regarded as a weak emperor, and it was he who, infatuated with one of his father’s concubines, took that concubine—Lady Wu—as his wife. It would be Wu who, de facto or de jure, ruled China from 665 to 705. When Dee refers to “our August emperor” in van Gulik’s novels, it is probably Gaozong’s father, Taizong (reigned 626–649), that should be imagined. Taizong was “one of the most admired and accomplished Chinese emperors. He has been revered by pre-modern and modern Chinese as an ideal emperor exemplifying the Confucian rule of benevolence” (Hwa 3). As van Gulik notes in the Preface to The Chinese Gold Murders, Gaozong (= Kao-tsung) was the actual emperor during Judge Dee’s magistracies. But Gaozong, dominated as he was by Wu Zetian, was August only in name, not in character.
Di’s final twenty-odd years were spent in and out of favor with Wu Zetian (Wu Zhao), who had been first a concubine of the Emperor Taizong1 and then the wife of Taizong’s son, the Emperor Gaozong. Wu had carefully accumulated power during Gaozong’s reign. After he suffered a stroke in 655, she became the principal authority in the empire, and when, upon his death in 683, their eldest son, Li Zhe, was declared the Emperor Zhongzong, Wu increasingly took open control. She had Zhongzong deposed in favor of her younger son, twelve-year-old Li Dan, who was declared the Emperor Ruizong. In 690, she forced Ruizong to step down, and declared herself the Sacred and Divine Empress, and the founder of the new Zhou dynasty. The Empress Wu had been ruthless in her rise to power, and many of the men who assisted her in rising and in maintaining her power were unsavory, but she also seems to have recognized and rewarded some men of integrity. Her hubris—along with her gender, her reputed sexual appetites, and her record of eliminating her opposition—appalled the Tang traditionalists, and she has generally been painted as a monstrous aberration in the line of Chinese emperors. There have, however, been some revaluations in the 20th and 21st centuries that see her reign—outside the hothouse of the capital—as a stable and benevolent one. Jonathan Clements observes that whatever the contesting elites thought of her assassinations and her appetites, she was “incredibly popular with the common people” (164). Di appears to have impressed her with his integrity and his skills. He was more than once attacked by members of her cabal, and was more than once demoted or exiled to the provinces. But the Empress seems to have been impressed by his straight-forwardness, and is reported to have wept at his death.
Di held a number of positions under the Empress: deputy minister of public works, deputy minister of finance, provincial governor in various districts and provinces, military commander; twice he occupied the office of chancellor. A few anecdotes speak to his achievements. In 688, Di was touring the Jiangnan Circuit (a region south of the Yangtze River) as Pacification Commissioner. He found that the region had too many temples dedicated to unusual local spirits, and had some 700 (or 1,700?) temples put to the torch. This suppression of certain (though not all) local cults was an expression of Di’s orthodox Confucianist bias. Like the fictional Judge Dee, Di was also troubled by the Buddhist coterie with which Empress Wu surrounded herself for much of her reign. The last documentary evide
nce from Di is a memorial he wrote in 700, protesting against the opulence of Buddhist temples (McMullen 22).
In a famous incident in 692, the head of the Empress’s secret police, Lai Junchen, accused Di, along with six other officials, of treason. Lai tried to induce them to confess by citing an imperial edict that stated that the lives of those who confessed would be spared, and Di immediately confessed and was not tortured. (One of the seven officials, Wei Yuan-chung, refused to confess, and was tortured. It was the untortured, but clever Di who emerged as the hero of the episode.) Di then wrote a petition on his blanket and hid it inside his winter coat; he had his family members take the coat home to have the lining removed. Di’s son, Di Guangyuan, discovered the petition and brought it to the Empress, who questioned Di and the others, eventually commuting all their sentences to exile.
During his exile in P’eng-tse, Di wrote a memorial to the court requesting a remission of taxes due to crop failures. He seems to have several times petitioned for leniency toward the people of the districts to which he was assigned, and several steles were erected by local communities to express their gratitude (McMullen 17). In 696, when the Khitan Khan, Sun Wanrong, led an invasion of China’s northern provinces, the Empress Wu sent Di as commander of the army that successfully repelled the invasion. And when, following Sun’s death in 697, the Khan Qapaghan Qaghan led another Khitan invasion in 698, the Empress sent Di to accompany her son, Li Xian on an expedition that, while it did not decisively defeat Qapagan, did drive his forces back on to the steppes (Rothschild 166).
The Empress is said to have respected him so greatly that she often just referred to him as Guolao (“State Elder”) without referring to him by name. When, on account of his old age, he offered to retire, she declined the offer. Prior to his death, Di had advanced many officials who shared his commitment to the Tang dynasty. Their success would not be complete until 705, five years after Di’s death, when the Empress Wu abdicated, her Zhou dynasty was disestablished, and her son Li Xian was restored as the Tang dynasty’s Zhongzong Emperor. Wu Zetian spent her final year under heavy guard.
One
Judge Dee and the Two Traditions of the Detective Story
Robert van Gulik’s decision not only to feature a Chinese detective detecting crime in China, but also to incorporate elements of the way Chinese writers had written about Chinese detectives detecting crime in China, means that the Dee series needs to be placed in two contexts. The distinctive conventions of the Chinese detective story—both as it was practiced in prior centuries and as it was responding to the new currents of the 20th century—need to be at least briefly outlined in order to see what van Gulik adapted from his sources in China and, as well, the ways contemporary Chinese writers themselves were adapting the formulas of the genre. The initial volumes of van Gulik’s original Judge Dee novels were drafted as proofs that instead of slavishly imitating the Western form of detective fiction, prototypes such as Wu Zetian si da qi an (the first half of which van Gulik had translated as Dee Gong An) demonstrated that the Chinese already had a viable detective tradition of their own. An examination of the principal features of that tradition may help to explain some of the essential qualities of van Gulik’s novels, and some account of the ways 20th-century Chinese writers attempted to assimilate the Western model may indicate the trend to which he was proposing an alternative.
But even in those first volumes, van Gulik was also working within what he recognized as many of the conventions of that Western form. It was, after all, the English-speaking consumer of detective fiction who would purchase The Chinese Maze Murders, and then The Chinese Bell Murders, and then The Chinese Gold Murders…. Van Gulik might entice those Anglophone readers with authentic Chinese flourishes, but like any writer who works within a genre, he had to ground his novelties on a foundation of the expected formulas. Exactly what he took these essential Western generic formulas to be can perhaps be derived from his explicit references to the detective story authors that he recognized as masters. What he took from these precedents, and what varied, may help to define the special hybrid qualities of the Judge Dee saga.
Judge Dee and the Chinese Tradition
Van Gulik opens his introduction to Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An) with an itemization of “five main characteristics” of the traditional Chinese detective story:
1. The criminal is normally “introduced to the reader at the very beginning of the book, with his full name, an account of his past history, and the motive that led him to commit the crime” (ii). The surprise ending, an essential element—perhaps the essential element—of the Western form, is therefore absent.
2. The supernatural—goblins, ghosts, visits to the Netherworld—appear frequently. The supernatural is prescriptively excluded from the Western form.
3. Narrative digressions—“lengthy poems, philosophical digressions, and what not” (iii)—are welcomed: “the Chinese are a leisurely people with a passionate interest for detail” (iii), and so embrace detective novels of one hundred chapters. The Western form favors shorter forms with a sharper focus on the investigative action.
4. Large casts of character with complex familial relationships are an attraction, not an obstacle in Chinese fiction. The Western novel prefers smaller casts and simpler, more nuclear relationships.
5. Explicit judicial conclusions: “The Chinese … expect a faithful account of how the criminal was executed, with every gruesome detail” (iv). The Western form is usually content to conclude with the identification of the villain; the penalty he or she suffers is presumed, not described.
Van Gulik’s observations build upon Vincent Starrett’s sketch of the Chinese tradition in his 1942 article, “Some Chinese Detective Stories.”1 Like van Gulik, Starrett also notes the role played by the supernatural in Chinese stories—not only the visits to and from the Netherworld, but also the folkloric testimony of animals and household utensils. Starrett mentions other minor conventions in the Chinese genre that van Gulik does not cite in his Preface, but does follow in the composition of his stories: the detective’s habit of discovering that crimes have been committed by “playing Haroun al Rashid among the populace,” the necessity of eliciting confession from the criminal (and, consequently, the sanctioned use of torture), an antagonism toward “monks and Taoist priests,” and the magistrate’s reliance upon an “entourage” of assistants who perform “much of the spade work” (Starrett 5–19). As a devotee of Sherlock Holmes and a founding member of the Baker Street Irregulars, Starrett could not uncritically embrace the Chinese detective story. He found the form fascinating, but he judged it to be somewhat wanting the principal virtues of the Western model: “In the popular literature of China a detective story—so to call it—is simply a horror or mystery story plus a righteous magistrate with a talent for investigation” (5). It would van Gulik’s mission to demonstrate that the Chinese form could allow for the sort of causal reasoning that was for Western readers the essence of the detective story. Van Gulik’s introductory contrast of five key aspects in each tradition is intended to lay the foundation for a new paradigm that retains the “righteous magistrate with a talent for investigation” along with all of those peculiarly Chinese conventions which do not preclude the defining pleasure of the Western form—that frisson of surprise when the detective expounds an irrefutable reconstruction of events leading to a definitive conclusion that the reader has not, but might have, reached for him or herself.
There are, of course, exceptions to be found on both sides of van Gulik’s division of the Chinese tradition from the Western. With regard to his first point (the criminal being introduced at the very beginning of the case), there is, for example, a line of British detective fiction in which the identity of the villain is identified at the beginning of the story, and the interest lies in the process of detection. Beginning with “The Case of Oscar Brodski” (1912), R. Austin Freeman, one of Conan Doyle’s first major heirs, made a specialty of the “inverted de
tective story” in which a detailed narrative of the commission of a crime—introducing the murderer, his motives, and his means—is followed by an account the painstaking collection of clues and questioning of witnesses that lead the detective to the correct conclusions.2
Naturalistic explanation is, indeed, de rigueur in the Western detective story. Confronted with the apparent appearance of a vampire in a Sussex village, Sherlock Holmes does insist, “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.” But The Hound of the Baskervilles showed that an air of the legendary and the occult could enhance a narrative that celebrated the detective’s “Science of Deduction.” John Dickson Carr would repeatedly play with the supernatural in his mystery novels, and not every paranormal event would be rationally explained in the end.
And while the Western detective story from Poe to Conan Doyle to Chesterton did emphasize the short story and the short novel, 19th-century writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Anna Katharine Green were producing detective novels that, if not reaching the dimensions of The Dream of the Red Chamber, did stretch to five and six hundred pages in length.