The Chinese Lake Murders

POSTSCRIPT

Judge Dee, the central figure of the present novel, is, as in all old Chinese detective stories, a district magistrate. From early times until the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912, this government official united in his person the function of judge, jury, prosecutor and detective.

The territory under his jurisdiction, a district, was the smallest administrative unit in the complicated Chinese government machine. It usually comprised one fairly large walled city, and all the countryside around it, say for sixty or seventy miles. The district magistrate was die highest authority in this unit; he was in charge of the town and land administration, the tribunal, the collection of taxes, registration of births, deaths and marriages, while he was also generally responsible for the maintenance of public order in the entire district. Thus he had practically full authority over all phases of the life of the people in his district, who called him, therefore, the "father-and-mother official." He was responsible only to the higher authority, viz. the prefect, or the governor of the province his district formed part of.

It was in his function of judge that the district magistrate displayed his talents as a detective. In Chinese crime literature, therefore, we find the masterminds that solve baffling crimes never referred to as "detectives," but always as "judges."

As in the other Judge Dee novels, I have tried to show here how comprehensive the duties of the magistrate were. Crimes were reported direcdy to him; it was he who was expected to collect and sift all evidence, find the criminal, arrest him, make him confess, sentence him, and finally administer to him just punishment for his crime.

To assist him in this onerous task he received but little help from the permanent personnel of the tribunal. The constables, the scribes, the guards, the warden of the jail, the coroner, all these minions of the law performed only their routine duties. The judge was not supposed to require their help in the gentle art of detection.

Every judge, therefore, had attached to his person three or four trusted lieutenants, whom he carefully selected at the beginning of his career, and kept with him while being transferred from one post to another, till he ended his career as a prefect or a provincial governor. These assistants derived their rank and position-which was higher than that of any of the other members of the tribunal-from the personal authority of the judge. It was upon them that the judge relied for assistance in the detection and solving of crimes.

Every Chinese detective story describes these lieutenants as fearless strong-arm men, experts in Chinese boxing and wrestling. They had to be, for the Chinese detective had the same noble tradition as his later English colleague of Bow Street: he carried no arms, and caught his man with his bare hands.

Like most of his colleagues, Judge Dee recruited these men from the "brothers of the green woods," that is to say, highway robbers of the Robin Hood type. They usually became outlaws because having been falsely accused, having killed a cruel official or for similar reasons they were forced to live by their wits. The Judge Dee novel The Chinese Gold Murders describes how, at the beginning of his career, he selected Ma Joong and Chiao Tai, and the present novel relates how the wily Tao Gan became attached to his staff.

These lieutenants were the judge's legmen. He sent them out to make inquiries; he told them to interview witnesses, trail suspects, find out the hiding place of a criminal and arrest him. This does not imply, however, that the judge himself refused to budge from his quarters. The code of conduct for the Chinese official prescribed that whenever a judge left the tribunal on official business, he should do so with all the pomp and circumstance incident to his office. But he could go about incognito, and often did. Having disguised himself, he would leave the tribunal in secret, and set out on private tours of investigation. The present novel describes Judge Dee's first experiment in this line, and the lessons he learned.

Still, it is true that the main scene of the judge's activity was the court hall of the tribunal. There, throned on the dais behind the high bench, he confused wily suspects by his clever questioning, bullied hardened criminals into a confession, and wheedled the truth out of timorous witnesses. The tribunal was a part of the offices of the district magistrate-• the town hall, as we would call it. These offices constituted together one large walled compound, being separated from each other by courtyards and galleries. On entering through the main gate-an ornamental archway flanked by the quarters of the guards-one found the court hall at the back of the first courtyard. A large bronze gong was suspended on a wooden frame at the gate. Three beats on this gong announced that a session of the court was about to be opened, while every citizen also had the right to beat this gong, at any time, to make it known that he wished to bring a case before the magistrate.

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 kidnaping 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