The court was a spacious hall, completely bare except for a few inscriptions suspended on the wall, extolling the majesty of the law. At the back of the hall was the dais, with the bench. Behind the bench stood a large armchair, occupied by the magistrate when the court was in session. To the left and right of the bench stood lower tables, where the scribes sat and noted down all the proceedings. Behind the bench, a doorway gave entrance to the private office of the magistrate-the judge’s chambers, as we would say. This doorway was covered by a screen bearing a large image of the unicorn, the ancient Chinese symbol of perspicacity. In his private office the magistrate conducted all routine business when the court was not in session. There were as a rule three sessions every day, one early in the morning, one at noon and one late in the afternoon or in the early evening. Sundays did not exist: the only official holiday was New Year’s Day.
The private office looked out on a second courtyard, around which were built a number of smaller offices where the clerks, the archivists, the copyists and the other personnel of the tribunal and the district administration did their work. Behind the chancery there was a garden with, at the back of it, the large reception hall, used for various public occasions and for receiving important visitors.
Finally, the compound contained the living quarters of the magistrate, where dwelt his wives, his children, and his own servants. These private quarters formed a small compound in themselves.
As to the methods followed by an ancient judge in solving crimes, he was naturally handicapped by the lack of all the aids developed by modern science. For him there were no fingerprint system, no chemical tests, no photographic experiments. On the other hand, his work was facilitated by the wide powers granted him under the provisions of the Penal Code. He could have anyone arrested on the mere issuing of a warrant; he could put the question to suspects under torture, have recalcitrant witnesses beaten up on the spot, use hearsay evidence, bully a defendant into telling a lie, and then trip him up with relish-in short, he could openly and officially use all kinds of third and fourth degrees which would make our judges shiver in their gowns. It must be added, however, that it was not by torture or other violent means that the ancient Chinese judges achieved their successes, but rather by their wide knowledge of their fellow men, their logical thinking and, above all, by their sound common sense. Chinese magistrates like Judge Dee were men of great moral strength and intellectual power, and at the same time refined literati, by their education thoroughly conversant with Chinese arts and letters. While their classical education had given them a comprehensive knowledge of human affairs, including a smattering of medicine and pharmacology, the detailed Buddhist speculations on the analysis of human emotions and the working of the mind, at an early date introduced into China from India, had given Chinese scholars shrewd psychological insight. Therefore Judge Dee’s analysis of Liu Fei-po’s abnormal love life as described in the present novel is not as anachronistic as it would seem at first sight.
Abuse of judicial authority was checked by several controlling factors. In the first place, the district magistrate was but a small cog in the colossal Imperial administrative machinery. Fie had to report his every action to his immediate superiors, accompanied by all pertaining original documents. Since every official, high or low, was held completely responsible for the actions of his subordinates, these data were carefully checked on several administrative levels, and if there was any doubt, a retrial was ordered. If a mistake was found there followed severe disciplinary action against the responsible magistrate. The magistrate’s position of well-nigh absolute power and complete superiority over all persons brought before his bench was but borrowed glory, based not on his personal rank but solely derived from the prestige of the system he was temporarily appointed to represent. The law was inviolable, but not the judge who enacted it. No judicial official could ever claim for himself immunity or any other privilege on the basis of his office. As soon as a higher authority found fault with a judge, he was summarily divested of all his power, and immediately reduced to the sorry state of “prisoner” before the bench, kneeling on the bare floor and beaten and insulted by the constables-until he had justified his conduct. In this novel I tried to illustrate this point.
It does credit to the democratic spirit that has always characterized the Chinese people, despite the autocratic form of their ancient government, that the most powerful check on abuse of judicial authority was public opinion. The Lü-hsing, a document dating from before the beginning of our era, states that “judges should act in concert with public opinion.” All sessions of the tribunal were open to the public and the entire town was aware of and discussed the proceedings. Thus all hearings of a case, also those of the preliminary investigation, were carried out in public; in this respect the old Chinese system was even ahead of our own. The teeming masses of the Chinese people were highly organized amongst themselves, and could make their voice heard. Next to such closely knit units as the family and the clan, there were the broader organizations of the professional guilds, the trade associations and the religious brotherhoods. If the populace chose to sabotage the administration of a cruel or arbitrary judge, taxes would not be paid on time, the registration would become hopelessly tangled, and public works would fall into disrepair. And soon an Imperial Censor would appear on the scene and institute an investigation. These dreaded Censors traveled strictly incognito all over the Empire, vested with absolute powers, and responsible only to the Throne. They were empowered to have any official summarily arrested and conveyed to the capital for trial.
The greatest defect of the system as a whole was that in the pyramidal structure too much depended on the top. When the standard of the metropolitan officials deteriorated, the decay quickly spread downward. The general deterioration of the administration of justice became conspicuous during the last century of Manchu rule in China. One need not wonder, therefore, that foreign visitors who observed affairs in China during the nineteenth century did not comment very favorably on the Chinese judicial system.
A second defect was that the system assigned far too many duties to the district magistrate. He was a permanently overworked official. If he did not devote practically all his waking hours to his work, he was forced to leave a considerable part of his duties to his subordinates. Men like Judge Dee could cope with their heavy task, but it can be imagined that lesser men would soon become wholly dependent on the permanent officers of their tribunal, such as the senior scribe, the headman of the constables, etc. And these small fry were particularly prone to abuse their power.
It may be added that the function of district magistrate was the steppingstone to higher office. Since promotion was based solely on actual performance, and since the term of office rarely exceeded three years or so, even mediocre persons did their utmost to be satisfactory father-and-mother officials, hoping in due course to be promoted to an easier post.
All in all the system worked well. The following statement by Sir George Staunton, the capable translator of the Chinese Penal Code, may be quoted here as a tribute to the ancient Chinese judicial system, all the more so since he wrote at the end of the eighteenth century, when the central authority of the Manchu conquerors was already disintegrating and when consequently many abuses of judicial power had set in. “There are substantial grounds for believing,” this cautious observer says, “that neither flagrant, nor repeated acts of injustice do, in point of fact, often, in any rank or station, ultimately escape with impunity.”
In this novel I have again followed the Chinese device-traditional in Chinese crime literature-of making the judge solve three cases at the same time. I have written up the three plots so as to form one continuous story, with the famous T’ang statesman Judge Dee as the central figure. Judge Dee, whose full name was Ti Jen-chieh, was a historical person, who 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. Later
he became a Minister of the Imperial Court and through his wise and courageous counsels exercised a beneficial influence on affairs of State.
The Case of the Vanished Bride is based upon an actual case of suspended animation recorded in the sixth section of the Ching-jen-chi-an “Strange Cases that Startled the World,” a collection of crime stories published in 1920 in Shanghai by a certain Wang Yih. He reprinted these tales verbatim from various older books, unfortunately without mentioning his sources. The case utilized here is stated to have actually occurred in the early years of the Emperor Kuang-hsü, that is circa 1880. I only used the main facts; the entire setting has been modified so as to adapt the case to that of the Drowned Courtesan.
The Case of the Drowned Courtesan was evolved by me as a framework connecting all three cases. A murder on a flower boat and the activities of secret political societies figure occasionally in Chinese novels of mystery and detection. It must be noted, however, that the White Lotus Society dates from after Judge Dee’s time. It began in the thirteenth century as a nationalistic Chinese movement directed against the rule of the Mongol conquerors, and flourished again circa 1600, when the Ming dynasty was nearing its end. In the present novel the White Lotus is represented as a treacherous conspiracy of criminals who only seek their own advantage, and such plots did indeed occur in Chinese history. But it must be added that as often as not they were organized by loyal and unselfish patriots who turned against an alien or oppressive government. It is worthy of notice that the Chinese Nationalist Party which, under the leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, in 1912 chased away the alien Manchu dynasty and founded the Chinese Republic, began as a secret political society called T’ung-meng-hui. In 1896 the Manchus placed a price on Dr. Sun’s head, and when he visited London he was decoyed into the Chinese Imperial Legation and secretly kept a prisoner there. He would have been conveyed back to China to be decapitated, but he succeeded in smuggling out a note about his kidnapping which was brought to the notice of the British authorities. Lord Salisbury intervened and effectuated his release. Truth is often stranger than fiction!
The motive of a robber’s nest located in an impregnable swamp is taken from the famous old Chinese picaresque novel Shui-hu-chuan, which is devoted entirely to the fails et gesles of such a robber band. There exist English versions of this novel by J. H. Jackson (Water Margin, two vols., published Shanghai, 1937), and by Pearl Buck (All Men are Brothers, London, 1937).
As regards the letter lock of the jade panel described in the present novel, simple padlocks working on this principle have been known in China for many centuries, and today still are widely used. The body of the padlock consists of a cylinder through which passes the crossbar of the lock. In the middle of the cylinder occur four or more loose rings, marked on the outside with five or seven Chinese characters. On the inside each ring has a dent which fits into a groove along the crossbar. The bar can be drawn out of the cylinder only when each ring is turned in the right position, i.e. when all the dents face the groove. This position can be remembered by a key sentence, composed of one of the characters of each ring.
The Chinese play two kinds of chess, hsiang-ch’i and wei-ch’i The former is played with men of different value, and the aim is to checkmate the opponent’s “general,” as in our game. This is a popular game played by all classes alike. Wei-ch’i, the game described in this novel, is much older, and played nearly exclusively by members of the literary class. In the eighth century it was introduced into Japan, where today it is still popular. The Japanese call it go. There exists an extensive literature on this very complicated and fascinating game, including handbooks with problems. A good English book on the subject is A. Smith’s The Game of Go, published New York, 1908, and reprinted Tokyo, 1956.
Finally it may be remarked that in China, contrary to the tendency in Western society, the upper middle-class families try to live together as much as possible in one and the same compound. When a son marries, one courtyard in the family compound is assigned to him, with its own kitchen and servants. The reason was that children had a duty to serve their parents, and therefore had to stay with them, and also that thus the various members of a family could co-operate more closely and promote each other’s interest. Wu-tai-tsai-t’ang, “five generations under one roof,” was the ideal of old Chinese family life. Therefore every Chinese upper-middle-class house was in reality a conglomeration of a number of separate households, connected by courtyards, open corridors and gardens. Hence the numerous courtyards mentioned in the descriptions of Chinese houses in this and the other Judge Dee novels.
—Dr. R. H. 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 Dee series of novels that have so captivated mystery readers ever since. He died of cancer in 1967.
Robert Van Gulik
The Judge Dee Mysteries
The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee
The Chinese Maze Murders
The Chinese Bell Murders
The Chinese Lake Murders
The Chinese Gold Murders
The Chinese Nail Murders
The Haunted Monastery
The Red Pavilion
The Lacquer Screen
The Emperor’s Pearl
The Monkey and the Tiger
The Willow Pattern
Murder in Canton
The Phantom of the Temple
Judge Dee at Work
Necklace and Calabash
Poets and Murder
A Chronology of the Judge Dee Books
Judge Dee at Work contains a "Judge Dee Chronology" telling of Dee's various posts, in which Van Gulik places the mysteries—both books and short stories—in the context of Dee's career and provides other information about the stories. On the basis of this chronology, the works can be arranged in the following order:
663 A.D. – Judge Dee is the magistrate of Peng-lai, a district in the Shantung province on the northeast coast of China.
The Chinese Gold Murders
"Five Auspicious Clouds", a short story in Judge Dee at Work
"The Red Tape Murders", a short story in Judge Dee at Work
"He Came with the Rain", a short story in Judge Dee at Work
The Lacquer Screen
666 A.D. – Judge Dee is the magistrate of Han-yuan, a fictional district on a lakeshore near the capital of Chang-An.
The Chinese Lake Murders
"The Morning of the Monkey", a short novel in The Monkey and the Tiger
The Haunted Monastery (Judge Dee, while traveling, is forced to take shelter in a monastery.)
"The Murder on the Lotus Pond", a short story in Judge Dee at Work (667 A.D.)
668 A.D. – Judge Dee is the magistrate of Poo-yang, a fictional wealthy district through which the Grand Canal of China runs (part of modern-day Jiangsu province).
The Chinese Bell Murders
"The Two Beggars", a short story in Judge Dee at Work
"The Wrong Sword", a short story in Judge Dee at Work
The Red Pavilion, visiting Paradise Island in the neighboring Chin-hwa district
The Emperor's Pearl
Poets and Murder, visiting neighboring Chin-hwa
Necklace and Calabash, visiting Rivertown and the Water Palace
670 A.D. – Judge Dee is the magistrate of Lan-fang, a fictional district at the western frontier of Tang China.
The Chinese Maze Murders
The Phantom of the Temple
"The Coffins of the Emperor", a short story in Judge Dee at Work (672 A.D.)
"Murder on New Year's Eve", a short story in Judge Dee at Work (674 A.D.)
6
76 A.D. – Judge Dee is the magistrate of Pei-chow, a fictional district in the far north of Tang China.
The Chinese Nail Murders
"The Night of the Tiger", a short novel in The Monkey and the Tiger
677 A.D. – Judge Dee is Lord Chief Justice (President of the Metropolitan Court) in the imperial capital of Chang-An.
The Willow Pattern
681 A.D. – Judge Dee is Lord Chief Justice for all of China.
Murder in Canton, visiting Canton
Two books, Poets and Murder and Necklace and Calabash, were not listed in the chronology (which was published before those two books were written); both were set during the time when Judge Dee was magistrate in Poo-yang.
Scribner
An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Chinese Lake Murders
Copyright © 1960 Robert H. Van Gulik
The Chinese Lake Murders Page 24
