The Emperor
For the first time in the Judge Dee series, van Gulik inserts a reference to the historical Tang Dynasty Emperor into a narrative. The imperial capital, Chang An, to which Judge Dee had been called in The Chinese Nail Murders, has been abandoned by the emperor and his court as a result of the plague which has afflicted the city. Hoo Pen, one of these Old World patriarchs, refers dismissively to “General Li,” then revises his reference to “the August Founder of the Present Dynasty.” This would be Li Yuan (566–635), a provincial governor under the last Sui emperor. Li was indeed appointed a general, engaged to battle rebellions against Sui rule launched in the west and the south. In 617 he himself rebelled, capturing the capital, Chang’an (modern Xian) and, in 618, proclaiming himself Gaozu, first emperor of the new Tang dynasty. Gaozu was succeeded by his second son, Li Shimin, who reigned as Taizong (626–649), and Taizong was succeeded by his son, Li Zhi, the Emperor Gaozong (b. 628; reigned 650–683). Gaozong would be the Emperor who, in 677 (the date van Gulik assigns to The Willow Pattern), has left Chang’an in hands of his Emergency Governor of the Imperial Capital, Dee Jen-djieh. By 677, Gaozong was in his dotage, and since 655 the Empress Wu had been the very active power behind the throne, maneuvering against potential rivals. But van Gulik never names Judge Dee’s emperor, and only in Murder in Canton does he make any reference to the Empress. Throughout the series it is implied that the Tang emperor whose mandate of heaven justifies Dee’s faith in the imperial system is a strong, fair, and benevolent authority.
Degenerate Lechery
Van Gulik’s fascination with sadists who delight in whipping women persists: Yee Kuei-ling is a disagreeable addition to the roll of abusers. He is killed by Bluewhite while taking his whip to her twin, Coral. Judge Dee excuses the murder, and chooses to have recorded as unsolved rather than embarrass Bluewhite (who is marrying Ma Joong) with a public exoneration in court. Dr. Lew is also exposed as a coarse lecher.
The Plague
Judge Dee has remained in the city as Emergency Governor of the Imperial Capital, with the task of maintaining order while the population endures a hot, windless drought as the dead are collected in cartloads by gangs of “scavengers.” There is some evidence that the bubonic plague, with its characteristic lumps and fevers, was present in seventh- and eighth-century China (see Benedict 9), but no specific outbreak can be dated to the time of Di Ren-jie. The plague does not directly affect any of the murder plots, but it does frame the novel, with Judge Dee staring “somberly” at the louring sky at the beginning of the novel, and rejoicing in the cleansing rains that come at the end. The plague becomes the occasion for the exposure of lechery, in all levels of society: the old aristocrat, Yee; the rising professional, Dr. Lew; and the brutal thugs, the scavengers who attempt to molest Coral and those who raped a widow and her two daughters.
The oppressive atmosphere compels the common people to withdraw, “cowering in their miserable hovels and shanties” (20.161), allowing the Emergency Governor to devote time to investigating the murders of Mei and Yee. And when the rains come, Dee can, with “a warm glow of pride,” praise those common people who emerge “unbeaten,” ready to resume their lives.
Van Gulik also assigns Judge Dee another brief statement of the justice that prevails under the Emperor. When Yuan, the puppeteer despairs of obtaining justice against the abuses committed by the decadent aristocracy (Yee Kuei-ling murdered his wife six years earlier), Dee reproaches him: “A gong hangs at the gate of every tribunal in the empire, and every citizen has the right to beat that gong to announce that he wants to report an injury. It is not only his privilege, but his civic duty. There is impartial justice in the empire, Mr. Yuan. Has been for the last two thousand years, if you except periods of national crisis and upheaval” (16.121). And though he does not say it, even in the present upheaval of a capital city oppressed by plague, the President of the Imperial Court is personally securing justice for Yuan and his daughters.
The Judge’s sense of justice leads him more broadly to assert the welfare of the many over the few. He approves the killing of some hundred citizens rioting at the food granary, arguing that had the rioters feasted, the rest of the population would starve. He also approves the summary execution of scavengers (men assigned to collect the plague afflicted dead) who seize the opportunity of the desolated city to prey on vulnerable women.
The Willow Pattern
As van Gulik’s extended postscript reminds the reader, the Willow Pattern as a design for fine porcelain originates in England, not China, and in the 18th century, not the 7th. The pattern depicts two figures crossing a curved bridge toward a water-pavilion, with a third figure following them, waving a threatening stick. In The Willow Pattern, this visual image is inventively used by a character to concoct a more or less plausible scenario designed to mislead Judge Dee.
Plug-uglies
“The Morning of the Monkey” had renewed van Gulik’s affection for “plug-ugly” (42); he has Judge Dee use it again in The Willow Pattern: “all kinds of thugs and plug-uglies” (11.130). The idiom derives from a name applied to a Baltimore, Maryland street gang active in the 1850s. Google’s Ngram viewer suggests that it gained its widest currency in 1940, and that by 1960 it had returned to obscurity. Van Gulik’s use of it helps to explain its failure utterly to vanish.
A second odd idiom is also repeated in the same novella and novel. A Chinese “gangster” in “The Morning of the Monkey” reports, “I overheard the Baker telling Ying something about a richard who has a big store in the marketplace here” (47), and in The Willow Pattern, the puppeteer Yuan contrasts the suffering poor with the rich, who can indulge their jaded appetites, “like the richards do, in the large house behind us” (5.28). Van Gulik appears to think “richard” is underworld argot for the wealthy, though there seems no precedent for this at all. In the American vernacular, at least, “richard” is an inverted backformation for private detective: “private detective” shortened to “private dick,” then, in a spasm of vernacular wit, lengthened to “private richard.”
Reviews
Reviewers noticed van Gulik’s acknowledgement that The Willow Pattern is an 18th century English motif, and certainly not a Tang (or Ming) Chinese motif. Sergeant Cuff, in Saturday Review noted, “Author concedes ‘conscious anachronism,’ but no harm done” (“Criminal Record,” 29 May 1965: 39). And: “Chinese detective stories are in a special class, and will appeal only to the discriminating few, but, because of the emphasis on the anachronistic Willow Pattern, and the postscript about it, this should be recommended to the collector of rare porcelain” (Library Journal, 1 May 1965: 2157). John William Mills Willett, writing in the Times Literary Supplement focused not upon the anachronism, but upon the sex: “Another good Judge Dee story with excellent cluing, but, as too often of late, too much perverse sex” (“A Concantenation of Crimes” 15 July 1965: 593).
12. Murder in Canton
(25 Chapters)
Scene: Canton, Lord Chief Magistrate Dee
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants: Chaio Tai, Tao Gan
The Cast:
Lew Tao-ming, Imperial Censor
Dr. Soo, the Censor’s advisor
Weng Kien, Governor of Canton
Pao Kwan, Prefect of Canton
Mrs. Pao, Pao’s wife and Liang Foo’s sister
Liang Foo, wealthy financier, son of the famous Admiral Liang
Yau Tai-kai, wealthy merchant
Mansur, leader of the Arab community
Zumurrud, Arab dancing girl
Ahmed and Aziz, Arab ruffians
Nee, a Chinese sea captain
Dunyazad, a slave girl belonging to Captain Nee
Dananir, Dunyazad’s twin sister, also a slave girl belonging to Captain Nee
Lan-lee, a blind girl who collects crickets
“The Case of the Imperial Censor”
Victims: Lew Tao-ming, poisoned; Dr. Soo, strangled
Villain’s motives: jealousy, am
bition
The Imperial Censor and his advisor have vanished in Canton. Judge Dee is sent from the northern capital to investigate. Dr. Soo is murdered while accompanying Chaio Tai; then the poisoned body of the Censor is discovered in a Buddhist temple. Judge Dee needs to pursue political and personal threads in the plot that led to the murders.
“The Case of the Smaragdine Dancer”
Victim: Zumurrud
Villain’s motive: fear of betrayal
Zumurrud is a dancer whose father was an Arab and whose mother belonged to the pariah Tanka minority. Her exotic appeal fascinates several important men, including Chaio Tai, who is present when she is killed by a javelin.
“The Case of the Secret Lovers”
Victim: Mrs. Pao
Villain’s motive: mistaken identity
Unsatisfied in her marriage with the Prefect, Mrs. Pao engages in a long-standing platonic relationship with another man. She is killed at their secret meeting place. Judge Dee quickly realizes that it was a case of mistaken identity.
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants
Having killed off Sergeant Hoong in The Chinese Nail Murders and married off Ma Joong in The Willow Pattern, van Gulik now in Murder in Canton disposes of the two remaining lieutenants with a second death and a second marriage, though the recipient of each fate is a surprise: Chaio Tai is killed and Tao Gan married.
CHAIO TAI
Ma Joong does not accompany Judge Dee on his mission to Canton. His marriage to Bluewhite and Coral at the end of The Willow Pattern has, now four years later, blessed him with eight children, and his domestic responsibilities keep him from journeying so far away. He has become “such a stay-at-home,” says Tao Gan (7.57), who now becomes Chaio Tai’s wine-drinking companion.
The Zumurrud episode represents a new stage in Chaio Tai’s development. Seeing her for the first time as she dances at a drinking party, Chaio Tai falls immediately under her spell. Her exotic sexuality captivates him: “Zumurrud fulfilled some indefinable need deep inside him, stirred something he had never even been aware of, but now suddenly recognized as the root of his being. He knew that he could not live without this woman” (9.80). Chaio Tai’s deep response to Zumurrud is unprecedented. Even when she confesses that it was she who had murdered the Imperial Censor, he can only think of his need to save her. Following her death, he requests permission to leave the Judge’s service and depart for the northern frontier, where he will join the army fighting the Tartars.
Van Gulik, however, has prepared a different fate for Chaio Tai. Upon entering the Judge’s service in The Chinese Gold Murders (1959), Chaio Tai had admired the Judge’s sword, Rain Dragon, and had declared that, “If it should be ordained that ever I should die by the sword, I pray that it may be this blade that is washed in my blood” (2.31). And in The Lacquer Screen (1962), a soothsayer had warned Chiao Tai that he would die by the sword (14.136). In Murder in Canton (1966), the prophecies are fulfilled. When Mansur seizes Rain Dragon in order to attack the sleeping judge, Chaio Tai intervenes and himself suffers the fatal blow. Judge Dee assures the dying Chaio that Rain Dragon will be buried with him.
TAO GAN
The parsimonious Tao Gan, with his signature three hairs projecting from a mole on his chin, has always been the older, less physical, more clever of Judge Dee’s lieutenants. In Murder in Canton, he receives his fullest development. He happens upon a blind girl, Lan-lee, being assaulted by two ruffians. Using his wits, he rescues her and discovers she is a lover of crickets. As it happens, the Imperial Censor is also a cricket lover, and Lan-lee becomes a person of interest in the investigation into the Censor’s disappearance and murder. She turns out to be the sister of the villain, Liang Foo. Liang had felt unnatural attraction to his sister; her rejection of his advances had led him to abuse her and finally to blind her. After Liang’s death in Chapter 22, Lan-Lee declines to inherit her share of the family estate, and returns to her crickets. But when, following the death of Chiao Tai, Tao Gan returns to Lan-lee and proposes marriage, her acceptance of the proposal ends the novel.
Thus, as the Judge Dee novels come to their chronological end in the final chapters of Murder in Canton, the fates of the five series characters have been determined: Sergeant Hoong and Chaio Tai are dead; Ma Joong and Tai Gan are married; and Judge Dee has renounced the investigation of crime and dedicated himself to a struggle against the Empress.
Plot
Murder in Canton is a rich novel, presenting Judge Dee with an intriguing cast of Chinese, Arab, Persian and Tanka figures. It also presents him with an unusually large number of corpses, beginning with that of the Imperial Censor, Lew Tao-ming; followed by his advisor, Dr. Soo; the wife of the Prefect Pao; Aziz and Ahmed, two Arab assassins; a Tanka assassin; Zumurrad, the Arab dancing girl; Zumurrad’s maid; Liang Foo, the wealthy and ambitious financier; Mansur, leader of the Cantonese Arabs; and, finally, Chiao Tai: 11 identified victims, all but four of them (the three assassins and the maid) important individuals. Two motives seems to drive the carnage: lust and ambition. The desire to possess Zumurrad is a principal factor in deaths of the Censor, Mansur, Liang Foo, and Chiao Tai, and, as well, causes Zumurrad’s own death and that of her maid. Her exotic Arab-Tanka character seems to exert an irresistible attraction: the middle-aged Censor, a power at the center of the Imperial Court and a virgin, meets her and is instantly bewitched. He dies because his struggle to secure a legitimate transition of imperial power upon the death of the present emperor to the Crown Prince (and not to the Empress Wu) delays his return to Canton and Zumurrad, and she cannot provide him with the antidote to the slow-working poison she had administered to him on his first visit. The lusts in Murder in Canton seem relatively straightforward; there may be a small touch of sadism in Yau Tai-kai’s beating his first wife with a rod, and a rather larger touch of incest in Liang Foo’s sexual interest in one of his sisters (and perhaps also in Captain Nee raising Dunyazad and Dananir as his daughters, permitting them as young women to parade half-naked through his household, and then finally marrying them).
Ambition is tied to lust. Judge Dee does not emphasize the notorious association of the historical Wu Zetian’s sexual appetites and her will to power, but it may be implicit in his observation that she is “handsome, energetic, extremely capable, but completely ruthless, swayed by strange passions and devoured by ambition for herself and her kin” (24.197). Pao Kwan is looking for a promotion in the bureaucracy. Mansur is hoping to lead an Arab revolt in Canton that will restore him to the graces of his uncle, the Caliph. Zurmurrad is desperately seeking legitimacy as Chinese woman, escaping the ostracization imposed upon her by her Tanka and Arab ancestry. And most interestingly, Liang Foo is hoping to enter the highest circles of imperial power by helping the Empress and her ally, the Chief Eunuch, displace the Crown Prince as heir to the ailing Emperor. Liang is the mastermind behind most of the crimes in Murder in Canton. When he and Judge Dee confront one another beside a chessboard toward the end of novel, Liang reveals that his reward was to be assigned Judge Dee’s office as President of the Imperial Court: just as the Empress is the malign antitype of the good Emperor, so Liang is the evil antitype of the good Judge Dee. Liang constructs a plot to overthrow the social order; Dee deconstructs that plot to preserve the order.
It might be noted that the novel ends with a note of love and humility. The blind cricket-girl, Lan-lee, is heir to her brother’s enormous wealth, but she chooses to renounce it and to resume her life of poverty. Tao Gan, disillusioned with women since having been betrayed decades earlier by his first wife, discovers a deep emotional attachment to Lan-lee and in the novel’s final lines proposes marriage.
Empress Wu
For the first time, van Gulik explicitly inserts the Empress into his series. He does not name her, but it is clearly Wu Zetian to whom he refers, and the Emperor is thus Gaozong, who was not quite as near death as is implied in the novel (Gaozong actually died in 683, two years after the nominal date of Murder in Canton). Ju
dge Dee describes the Empress as a woman “tormented by perverse passions” (22.179). She and “her clique” are attempting to discredit the upright Imperial Censor as they maneuver to seize power. Judge Dee’s detective work (and the covering up he is able to impose) has foiled their plot, and Dee concludes, “The Crown Prince will not be ousted from his rightful position” (24.197).
There was a series of heirs apparent as the historical Empress Wu pursued her path to de facto, and eventually de jure, supreme authority in China. She had had one Crown Prince, her own oldest son, Li Hong, poisoned in 675. Her second son, Crown Prince Li Xian, was exiled in 680 (one year before Murder in Canton) and forced to commit suicide in 684. Crown Prince Li Zhe, Wu’s third son, was declared Emperor upon the death of his father, Gaozong, but within two months, Wu had him deposed in favor of her fourth son, Li Dan. (It would be Li Dan, reigning as Emperor Ruizong, who would abdicate in favor of his mother in 690, who then ruled in her own name until 705.)
Mrs. Kuo
The suicide of Mrs. Kuo in The Chinese Nail Murders, continues to haunt Judge Dee. “The Night of the Tiger” had opened with Dee unable to forget “the tragic experience that had marked his last days as magistrate of Pei-chow” (73). With the capital in the grip of the Black Death, the Judge was evidently too preoccupied to remember her in The Willow Pattern, but now, in the third story set after Mrs. Kuo’s death, she reappears. Attempting to comfort Chiao Tai following the death of Zumurrud, Judge Dee recalls how, following Mrs. Kuo’s death, he too felt the world “suddenly seemed grey and lifeless, dead” (20.161). The parallel is not exact, but it is true that both Judge Dee and Tao Chiao find themselves emotionally involved with women whom they discover have committed murder. Tao Chaio feels a moment of despair, and wants to escape back into the military, but by the end of the novel is prepared to resume his duties as Dee’s lieutenant. Judge Dee, now four years after the events of The Chinese Nail Murders, still feels the impact of Mrs. Kuo’s leap to her death. As the series evolves, van Gulik not only attempts to refer back to earlier cases—something detective story writers have always done (such references are, of course, inducements to purchase and read the earlier tales), but also makes the point that detectives can be moved—lastingly moved—by the events they have been investigating.
The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik Page 18
