The Chinese Bell Murders

POSTSCRIPT

A feature all old Chinese detective stories have in common is that the role of detective is always played by the magistrate of the district where the crime occurred.

This official is in charge of the entire administration of the district under his jurisdiction, usually comprising one walled city and the countryside around it for fifty miles or so. The magistrate's duties are manifold. He is fully responsible for the collection of taxes, the registration of births, deaths and marriages, keeping up to date the land registration, the maintenance of the peace, etc., while as presiding judge of the local tribunal he is charged with the apprehension and punishing of criminals and the hearing of all civil and criminal cases. Since the magistrate thus supervises practically every phase of the daily life of the people, he is commonly referred to as the 'father-and-mother official.'

The magistrate is a permanently overworked official. He lives with his family in separate quarters right inside the compound of the tribunal, and as a rule spends his every waking hour upon his official duties.

The district magistrate is at the bottom of the colossal pyramidal structure of ancient Chinese government organisation. He must report to the prefect, who supervises twenty or more districts. The prefect reports to the provincial governor, who is responsible for a dozen or so prefectures. The governor in his turn reports to the central authorities in the capital, with the Emperor at the top.

Every citizen in the Empire, whether rich or poor and regardless of his social background, could enter official life and become a district magistrate by passing the literary examinations. In this respect the Chinese system was already a rather democratic one at a time when Europe was still under feudal rule.

A magistrate's term of office was usually three years. Thereafter he was transferred to another district, to be in due time promoted to prefect. Promotion was selective, being based solely on actual performance; less gifted men often spent the greater part of their lives as district magistrate.

In exercising his general duties the magistrate was assisted by the permanent personnel of the tribunal, such as the constables, the scribes, the warden of the jail, the coroner, the guards and the runners. Those, however, only perform their routine duties. They are not concerned with the detection of crimes.

This task is performed by the magistrate himself, assisted by three or four trusted helpers; these he selects at the beginning of his career and they accompany him to whatever post he goes. These assistants are placed over the other personnel of the tribunal. They have no local connections and are therefore less liable to let themselves be influenced in their work by personal considerations. For the same reason it is a fixed rule that no official shall ever be appointed magistrate in his own native district.

The present novel gives a general idea of ancient Chinese court procedure. The illustrations facing p. 50 and 280 show the arrangement of the court-hall. When the court is in session, the judge sits behind the bench, with his assistants and the scribes standing by his side. The bench is a high table covered with a piece of red cloth that hangs down in front from the top of the table to the floor of the raised dais.

On this bench one always sees the same implements: an inkstone for rubbing black and vermilion ink, two writing brushes, and a number of thin bamboo spills in a tubular holder. These staves are used to mark the number of blows that a criminal receives. If the constables are to give ten blows, the judge will take ten markers and throw them on the floor in front of the dais. The headman of the constables will put apart one marker for every blow.

One will also see on top of the bench the large square seal of the tribunal, and the gavel. The latter is not shaped like a hammer as in the West. It is an oblong piece of hardwood about one foot long. In Chinese it is significantly called ching-t'ang-mu 'Wood that frightens the hall.'

The constables stand facing each other in front of the dais, in two rows on left and right. Both plaintiff and accused must kneel between these two rows on the bare flagstones and remain so during the entire session. They have no lawyers to assist them, they may call no witnesses, and their position is generally not an enviable one. The entire court procedure was in fact intended to act as a deterrent, impressing the people with the awful consequences of getting involved with the law. As a rule there were every day three sessions of the tribunal, in the morning, at noon, and in the afternoon.

It is a fundamental principle of Chinese law that no criminal can be pronounced guilty unless he has confessed to his crime. To prevent hardened criminals from escaping punishment by refusing to confess even when confronted with irrefutable evidence, the law allows the application of legal severities, such as beating with whip and bamboo, and placing hands and ankles in screws. Next to these authorised means of torture magistrates often applied more severe kinds. If, however, an accused should receive permanent bodily harm or die under such severe torture, the magistrate and the entire personnel of his tribunal were punished, often with the extreme penalty. Most judges, therefore, depended more upon their shrewd psychological insight and their knowledge of their fellow men than on the application of severe torture.

All in all the ancient Chinese system worked reasonably well. Sharp control by the higher authorities prevented excesses, and public opinion acted as another curb on wicked or irresponsible magistrates. Capital sentences had to be ratified by the Throne and every accused could appeal to the higher judicial instances, going up as far as the Emperor himself. Moreover, the magistrate was not allowed to interrogate the accused in private, all his hearings of a case, including the preliminary examination, had to be conducted in the public sessions of the tribunal. A careful record was kept of all proceedings and these reports had to be forwarded to the higher authorities for their inspection.

The reader may wonder how it was possible that the scribes accurately noted down the court proceedings without the use of shorthand. The answer is that the Chinese literary language in itself is a kind of shorthand. It is possible, for instance, to reduce to four written ideographs a sentence that counts say twenty or more words in the colloquial. Moreover there exist several systems of running handwriting, where characters consisting often or more brush strokes can be reduced to one scrawl. While serving in China I myself often had Chinese clerks make notes of complicated Chinese conversations and found their record of astonishing accuracy.

I may remark in passing that the old Chinese written language did not as a rule have any punctuation and that in Chinese there is no difference between capitals and small type. The falsification mentioned in the fourteenth chapter would, of course, be impossible in most alphabetical systems of writing.

'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 favourite 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 followed Chinese tradition in inserting near the end of the book a kind of survey of the cases by neutral observers (twenty-third chapter), and I also added a description of the execution of the criminals. Chinese sense of justice demands that the punishment meted out to the criminal should be set forth in full detail. At the same time, Chinese readers want to see at the end of the book the meritorious magistrate promoted and all other deserving persons suitably rewarded. This trait I reproduced in a more or less subdued way: Judge Dee receives an official commendation in the form of an Imperial inscription, and the Yang girls a gift in money.

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.

The posthumous marriage mentioned in the thirteenth chapter was fairly common in China. It occurred most often in the case of chih-fu, or the marriage of-unborn children. Two friends would decide that their children would eventually marry each other. Frequently, if one of the two children died before having reached marriageable age, it was married to the surviving partner posthumously. In case of the bridegroom surviving this was a mere matter of form. The polygamic system allowed him to marry one or more other wives, but in the family register the dead child-bride remained recorded as the one and only First Wife.

In the present novel the Buddhist clergy is placed in a very unfavourable light. In this respect also I followed Chinese tradition. The writers of ancient novels were mostly members of the literary class who as orthodox Confucianists had a prejudice against Buddhism. In many ancient Chinese crime stories the villain is a Buddhist monk.

I also adopted the Chinese custom of beginning a crime novel with a brief introductory story where the main events of the novel itself are alluded to in veiled terms. And I also retained the Chinese-style chapter headings in two parallel sentences.

The plot of the 'Rape Murder in Half Moon Street' is derived from one of the most famous cases ascribed to Pao-kung, 'Judge Pao' (full name Pao Ch'eng), a well-known statesman who lived during the Sung period; he was born in 999 and died in 1062. Much later, during the Ming dynasty, cases allegedly solved by him were written up by an anonymous author in a collection of crime stories called Lung-t'u-kung-an, or in other editions, Pao-kung-an. The case utilised in the present novel is called in the original O-mi-t'o-fo-chiang-ho. This brief story gives but a bare outline, while the way in which the magistrate discovers the truth is not very satisfactory. He makes the criminal confess by letting his agents act the part of ghosts of the underworld, a popular motive in Chinese detective novels. I preferred to substitute a more logical solution, giving 'Judge Dee' some scope for exercising his deductive talent.

'The Secret of the Buddhist Temple ' is based on a story entitled Wang-ta-yin huo-fen Pao-lien-ssu, 'Magistrate Wang burns the Pao-lien Temple.' This is the thirty-ninth tale in a seventeenth-century collection of crime and mystery stories, published under the title of Hsing-shih-heng-yen, 'Constant Words for Rousing the World.' This collection was compiled by the Ming scholar Feng Meng-lung (died 1646); he was a prolific writer who in addition to two similar collections published also a number of plays, novels and scholarly treatises. I retained all main features of the plot, including the introduction of the two prostitutes. The original, however, ends with the magistrate burning down the monastery and summarily executing the monks, an arbitrary procedure that is not allowed under the ancient Chinese Penal Code. I substituted a more complicated solution, utilising the attempts of the Buddhist church to dominate the government, which during the T'ang dynasty at one time constituted quite a problem. It is not inapposite to let 'Judge Dee' play the leading role in this story. It is an historic fact that at one time in his career he had a large number of temples where evil practices prevailed destroyed.

The essence of the 'Case of the Skeleton under the Bell ' was suggested by the famous old Chinese crime novel Chiu-tning-ch'i-yuan, 'The Strange Feud of the Nine Murders.' This novel is based on a ninefold murder which actually took place in Canton, round the year 1725. In the original the case is solved in the regular way in court. I gave it a more sensational ending, borrowing the motif of the bronze temple bell, which occurs at least once in every collection of crime and mystery stories of the Ming and Ch'ing periods

The flogging of the mats utilised in the twenty-fourth chapter was suggested by the following story: 'When Li Hui of the Later Wei Dynasty (a.d. 386-534) served as Prefect of Yung-chou, a salt carrier and a wood carrier quarrelled about a lamb-skin, each claiming it as the very one he used to wear on his back. Li Hui ordered one of his officers: "Question this skin under torture, then you will know its owner." All the officers were dumbfounded. Li Hui had the lambskin placed on a mat, and had it beaten with a stick; then grains of salt came out of it. He showed them to the contestants, and the wood carrier confessed' (c.f. R. H. van Gulik, T'ang-yin-pi-shih, 'Parallel Cases from under the Pear-tree,' a thirteenth-century manual of Jurisprudence and Detection, Sinica Leidensia, Vol. X, Leiden, 1956). I thought that a more or less detailed account of the feud between the two families as given in the thirteenth chapter of the present novel would be of some interest to the Western reader. The Chinese are by nature a very forbearing people, most controversies are settled out of court by compromise. On occasion, however, virulent feuds will arise between families, clans or other groups, and then these are carried on relentlessly till their bitter end. The case Liang versus Lin is a good example of such a feud. Similar instances sometimes occurred among Chinese immigrant communities abroad. I mention the 'tong wars' in the United States, and the internecine fights of the 'Kongsi's' or Chinese secret societies in the former Netherlands East Indies in the end of the nineteenth, and the early years of the twentieth century.

R. H. v. G.