The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik
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The Judge’s initial view of Taoism is a familiar one: “A weird creed, Taoism! Why should one need all that mummery of mystery plays and pompous religious ceremonies when we have the wise and crystal-clear teachings of our Master Confucius to guide us? One can only say for Taoism that it is at least a purely Chinese creed, and not an importation from the barbarous West, like Buddhism!” (3.22). In Chapter Eight, Sun Ming engages Dee in a discussion of some of the deeper truths of Taoism. “Taoism continues where Confucius left off,” he argues. “Confucianism explains how man should behave as a member of an ordered society. Taoism explains man’s relations to the Universe—of which that social order is but one aspect” (10.59–60). Sun proceeds to lecture Dee on yin and yang, and specifically on the Taijitu (= t’ai chi t’u) diagram—the circle divided in half by an s-shaped curve, one side of which is white with a black dot, and the other side black with a white dot. (The diagram becomes a clue in the solution to the mystery.)
At the novel’s end, Judge Dee explicitly repudiates the transcendental orientation of Sun’s Taoism and reaffirms his commitment to the this-worldliness of Confucianism: “The question is, Tao Gan, whether we are meant to discover the mystery of life…. Taoism has many elevated thoughts, it teaches us to requite good with good, and bad also with good…. I prefer to keep to the practical wisdom of our Master Confucius, who teaches us our simple, everyday duties to our fellow-men, and to our society, and to requite good with good, and bad with justice.” The “abstruse knowledge” pursued by Taoism may, Dee asserts, “inspire that evil, inhuman pride that turns a man into a cruel fiend” (20.151).
Sun Ming is exposed as exactly such a fiend. His metaphysical speculations have led him to regard himself as beyond good and evil. In his final dialogue with Judge Dee, he calmly defends his sadistic experiments with young women as his “hobby.” He sees himself as “far above ordinary human rules and limitations” (19.146). And he is, Judge Dee realizes, correct, at least as far as the practical justice of the Confucianist system; Sun is above the reach of common laws. The charges of a district magistrate against a famous Taoist sage and Imperial tutor would be readily dismissed. And therefore the Confucianist magistrate must forego judicial procedure; The Haunted Monastery will not end in the judge’s courtroom or the executioner’s platform. Dee tricks the Taoist into a trap, locking him in a room with an enormous bear and a very small window of escape. Sun’s survival will, Judge Dee says, now be up to a “higher tribunal.” For the first time, a Judge Dee novel does not end with legal formality. Dee is not presiding in court; he is not wearing his winged cap and speaking as the voice of the imperial justice system. The “higher tribunal” executes Sun, and five murders are justly avenged. But Judge Dee has perhaps himself taken a step to placing himself above ordinary human rules and limitations.
Sexual Perversion
Sun Ming’s sadism introduces a note that will be repeated in the second series. Van Gulik was, as a scholar, much interested in eroticism, both artistic eroticism (Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period, 1951) and practical eroticism (Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 BC Till 1644 AD, 1961). Sexual matters had certainly not been suppressed in the first five novels, but they become central issues in the second series. Sun Ming’s megalomania might have expressed itself in any number of forms; van Gulik chose to have him express it in series of abusive treatments of young girls.
Tsung Lee
The poet is one of the impudent young men whom van Gulik seems to favor. Judge Dee initially finds him clever, but callow; later Dee detects emerging virtues and happily unites him with White Rose. Poets will continue to be favored persons in the Dee series, a reflection of the esteem in which historical Chinese culture has always held its poets.
The Judge also unites White Rose’s brother, who has been disguised as “Miss Ou-yang,” with the actress Miss Ting. The erotic feelings which Miss Ting had expressed for Miss Ou-yang are thus excused. Judge Dee had, however, explicitly indicated his own indifference to Miss Ting’s sexual preference: “since both of you are grown-up and free women, your love-life is no concern of mine” (10.81). The very neat resolution allows Miss Ting to find her happiness in a heterosexual marriage with a man demonstrably competent in feminine dress and behavior.
An interesting aspect of Tsung is his back story: his grandfather was a “coolie” in the south of China. Practicing letters by writing in the sand while sitting outside the village school, he managed to pass the first exam. The village shopkeepers then collected money to further his studies, and he was successful in exams at the provincial level. He was made a magistrate, and he married a girl from an old but impoverished family. His son, Tsung Lee’s father, passed all his exams, married the daughter of a rich merchant, and rose to the status of Provincial Governor (9.69–70). Tsung Lee is bright young member of the literati (though a still maturing man). The three generations of Tsungs thus embody meritocratic ideal of the Confucian state.
Reviews
Copyright issues delayed the publication of The Haunted Monastery in the United States. When it finally appeared, Allen J. Hubin, now the columnist for “Criminals At Large” in the New York Times, carried on Anthony Boucher’s positive response: “The China of old, in Mr. van Gulik’s skilled hands, comes vividly alive again” (New York Times 9 February 1969: BR40).
7. The Emperor’s Pearl
(20 Chapters)
Scene: Poo-yang, Judge Dee’s 3rd posting
The Magistrate’s Lieutenant: Sergeant Hoong Liang
The Cast:
Pien Kia, a doctor of medicine
Tong Mai, vagrant student of literature, dragonboat drummer
Sia Kwang, vagrant student of literature
Kou Yuan-liang, wealthy curio-collector
Gold Lotus, Kou’s first wife, non compos mentis
Amber Lady, second wife of Kou Yuan-liang, former slave of Tong I-kwan
Yang, owner of an antique shop
Kwang Min, a dealer in medicinal drugs
Mr. Sun, Kwang’s partner
Miss Lee, a young prostitute
Mrs. Meng, an old procuress
Sheng Pa, Head of the Beggar’s Guild (cf. The Chinese Bell Murders)
Violet Liang, athletic owner of a martial arts training hall
“The Case of the Dead Drummer”
Victims: Tong Mai, poisoned
Villain’s motive: greed, self-protection
Tong Mai, son of Tong I-kwan, a dissolute student, and a sometime procurer in the curio trade, dies as his dragon boat approaches the finish line in Chapter Two.
“The Case of the Murdered Slavemaid”
Victim: Amber Lady, stabbed; Sia Kwang, beaten; Meng, strangled
Villain’s motive: lust, greed
Judge Dee, having assumed the incognito of a boxing instructor, is employed by the Amber Lady, the second wife of Kou Yuan-liang, as a bodyguard. At the abandoned house of her former master, near the temple to the local River Goddess, known as the White One or the White Lady, she dismisses him, but Judge Dee remains and hears her being murdered. Judge Dee briefly suspects her of infidelity, but concludes she was a faithful wife.
“The Case of the Emperor’s Pearl”
Victim: none
Villain’s motive: greed
The curio collector Kou Yuan-liang believes his second wife, the Amber Lady, has gone to the abandoned temple of The White One to purchase a large pearl, which had been given one hundred years ago to the present emperor’s grandfather by the Persian ambassador, and which had been lost for two generations. Judge Dee regards the story as a red herring until, by chance, he recovers the pearl in the final chapter.
Plot
In The Haunted Monastery, the central murder mystery was not the topic of any of the three “Cases”; in The Emperor’s Pearl, the title mystery, which is also the title of one of the “Cases,” has nothing to do with any of the murder mysteries that Judge Dee investigates. One v
ictim, the Amber Lady, believes she is purchasing the pearl in the abandoned house of Tong Mai’s father, but until the Judge’s recovery of the pearl in the final chapter, no one else believes in its reality. It motivates none of the current crimes (though several people were executed at the Imperial Court on the occasion of its disappearance two generations earlier).
The four murders that do occur—those of Tong Mai (Chapter 2), Amber Lady (Chapter 4), Sia Kwan (Chapter 9) and Mrs. Meng (Chapter 14)—are directly related to one another. All are committed by (or under the direction of) a single villain, and that villain is driven by a single (though complex) motive: he desires to possess an ideal beauty and, frustrated, to revenge himself upon lesser beauties. Van Gulik’s attempt to distribute his characters under three “Cases” seems quite arbitrary.
The revelation of the villain comes in a scene that combines conventions of both western and Chinese detective fiction. Having outlined three complex sequences of events, each one pointing to a different suspect, Judge Dee summons all three to meeting (while arranging for a fourth also to be present). A diagram of the seating arrangements is provided. And then, drawing upon the device that the author of Dee Goong An employed, the Judge fabricates a seemingly supernatural phenomenon—here a detached arm that appears to move—to shock the villain into confession. Though the ruse works, it cannot be called a creditable detective-story device. Dee has the wooden arm point its accusing forefinger at the suspects by having it move across his table. He achieves this effect by gluing it to the back of a tortoise. When, from the back of the darkened room—behind the suspects—Sergeant Hoong waves some green leaves, the hungry turtle, blessed with either excellent vision or an excellent nose, immediately begins to bear the arm in the direction of the suspects. This unlikely occurance proves superfluous, as the actual murderer is concealed behind the judge, and he blurts out his confession not because of the accusing finger (which is pointing away from him), but because the woman he raped four years ago has, partly as the result of an opportune thunderstorm, suddenly recovered her mental faculties and describes the rape, which lies at the root of all four murders.
“Degenerate lechery”
Judge Dee will apply the phrase “degenerate lechery” to the man who engages in a series of sadistic episodes in which he hires thugs to abduct attractive young women whom he can strip, tie face down, beat, and release. Unlike the degenerate lecher in The Haunted Monastery, whose sadism is based on a philosophy of will, the degenerate lecher in The Emperor’s Pearl is motivated by a perverted aestheticism. Yang is a dealer in fine antiques, but he admits in an early conversation with Judge Dee that sometimes he acquires a piece that is so desirable that he must retain possession of it and cannot sell it. Four years earlier he had discovered the need to “possess” the beautiful Gold Lotus, wife of his fellow antique dealer, Kou Yuan-liang. Decoying her to the Temple of the White Goddess, he raped her, but she escaped, eventually returning to her husband’s house, where she has lived for four years in a near-catatonic state.
Both Sun in The Haunted Monastery and Yang in The Emperor’s Pearl inflict pain upon women. The megalomaniac Sun does it as experiments in his transcendence of human limitations. Yang does it in an insane desire to possess beauty, and when his highest beauty—Gold Lotus—rejects his “possession” of her, he declares, “She murdered me” (18.161). As a result, he has dedicated himself to abusing surrogates: “All those others I made grovel before me begged for mercy in her voice, it was her flesh I lacerated, her blood I saw flow, her…” (18.161). It can be argued that Sun became the victim of his own mania, that his vicious demonstrations of his unique autonomy only prove his complete subjugation to his vice. But here Yang acknowledges that he is no longer an aesthete possessing a passion for beauty, but a hollow man possessed by a passion for attacking beauty. Sun ends his life in a violent struggle with a bear; Yang quietly accepts his judicial fate.
The White Lady
Neither Buddhism nor Taoism plays a role in The Emperor’s Pearl. Instead, Judge Dee must deal with a local cult. The White One is a river goddess. In ancient times, a young man would be sacrificed annually to her at her temple in the Mandrake Grove in the village of Marble Bridge, several miles south of Poo-yang. Though the sacrifice has been discontinued and the temple abandoned, the people of Poo-yang and Marble Bridge Village are pleased by the death of Tong Mai, regarding it as a propitiatory sacrifice.
In the last chapter of the novel Judge Dee returns to the abandoned house of Tong I-Kwan, next to the Mandrake Grove containing the statue of the goddess. He discovers the Emperor’s Pearl when restoring a baby bird to the nest from which it has, by chance, fallen. And then he reflects on chance and coincidence. As a final gesture, he visits the small shrine to the White One near the river in Marble Bridge Village. He stares at the statue of the goddess, and reflects, “You are only a man-made idol, but you stand as a symbol of what man cannot know, and is not destined to know. As such, I make my humble bow to you” (20.173). Confucius has not been mentioned in The Emperor’s Pearl, but Dee has been as Confucian as ever in his service as magistrate. Yet he acknowledges that there are things—ways of the world—beyond man’s comprehension. And these things are here symbolized by a female goddess. His final gesture is to donate a silver piece to the old priest who tends the shrine, asking for a stick of incense to be burned in memory of Kou’s murdered wife, the Amber Lady, whom he had for a time suspected of infidelity and whom he had discovered to have been extraordinarily devoted to her husband. Having expressed humility before the goddess and contrition for his suspicion of the woman, Judge Dee tells the priest to enter his donation as “Dee from Tai-yuan … a student.”
The Return of Sheng Pa
Sheng Pa, the burly Head of the Beggar’s Guild, who made such an impression in the first Poo-yang novel, The Chinese Bell Murders, returns. He is, again, a vivid character, and van Gulik now provides him with an equally vivid (and burly) match, Violet Liang, nee Alton Tseleg Khatun. Violet is a Mongolian who entertained the Emperor’s court with her naked wrestling until the court ladies succeeded in having her troupe expelled. The Third Prince took her under his protection, and she now operates her school under Imperial auspices. In a comic episode, Violet rescues Miss Lee by overcoming and severely injuring three thugs who are kidnapping the girl. Judge Dee finds himself acting as a go-between on behalf of Sheng Pa.
Sheng Pa is also mentioned again in the short story, “The Two Beggars.”
Reviews
Given problems with securing the American copyright to The Red Pavilion, The Haunted Monastery, and The Lacquer Screen (van Gulik had sent to Gregory Lounz in New York a few hundred copies of the editions of these novels that he had had published in Kuala Lumpur), The Emperor’s Pearl became the first Judge Dee novel published by Scribner. It was positively received: “a new series of these ingenious puzzles” (Sergeant Cuff, “Criminal Record,” Saturday Review 28 November 1964: 35); “an intricate, somewhat Holmesian detective story” (“Mystery and Crime,” The New Yorker 5 September 1964).
8. The Lacquer Screen
(18 Chapters)
Scene: Wei-ping, between the Prefectural capital and Peng-lai, Judge Dee’s 1st posting. Dee, aged 34, is returning from a conference on coastal defenses and has obtained leave to spend an incognito holiday in the historically interesting district of his fellow Magistrate, Judge Teng.
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants: Chaio Tai
The Cast:
Teng Kan, magistrate of Wei-ping, a poet
Mrs. Teng, nee Woo, called Silver Lotus, a poet, raped and stabbed
Pan Yoo-te, Teng’s counselor
Ko Chih-yuan, wealthy silk merchant; apparent suicide
Mrs. Ko, nee Hsieh, wife of the silk merchant
Leng Chien, banker
Leng Te, Leng’s recently deceased younger brother, a painter
Kun-shan, professional thief
The Corporal (Liu Woo), boss of the Wei-ping underworld
&n
bsp; The Student (Hsia Liang), a novice hoodlum
Carnation, a prostitute
“The Case of the Lacquer Screen”
Victim: Mrs. Teng, raped and stabbed
Villain’s motive: lust; madness
Mrs. Teng’s body is discovered in a marsh. Judge Teng believes he has murdered her in a fit of madness, as prophesied in a four-part lacquer screen he had purchased shortly after their marriage. Judge Dee detects anomalies and asks Teng to delay making a confession to the Prefect. In the disguise of a court-official-turned-criminal, Judge Dee visits the Phoenix Inn, headquarters of The Corporal. He discovers evidence that exonerates Judge Teng and identifies the actual murderer.
“The Case of Credulous Merchant”
Victim: Ko Chih-yuan, apparent suicide
Villain’s motive: greed, lust
Ko Chih-yuan, a wealthy but nervous merchant, threw a dinner party at his pavilion by the river. Feeling ill, mid-way through the meal he returned to his house, only to emerge with a bloody forehead and race toward the wall at the riverbank. He then apparently either fell or flung himself into the river, whose swift current has prevented the recovery of his body. Judge Dee infers that he has been murdered, discovers the location of the corpse, and in Judge Teng’s courtroom plays the murderer against the accomplice to obtain confessions.
“The Case of the Faked Accounts”
Victim: Ko Chih-yuan, embezzlement
Villain’s motive: greed