The Shadow of the Empire

by Qiu Xiaolong

  ‘All in all, it’s a believable statement, acceptable with so many bizarre details in the case convincingly explained. I don’t think those men of letters or any other busybodies could have anything else to say about the conclusion.’

  So the latest version – the one in the letter grasped in his hand – was pretty much the first scenario Judge Dee had suggested to her in the prison cell, with Xuanji represented as a murderer driven by jealousy, and with Wei cast as an accomplice, though it was not without some minor, intriguing modifications here and there improvised by the poetess.

  Was that statement a truthful one?

  After all, anything was possible for a woman madly in love. At least it could prove to be acceptable to Mayor Pei who was so desperate for a satisfactory conclusion.

  But was it possible that her statement was given simply to cover the second scenario involving the man in the yellow silk underrobe embroidered with golden dragons?

  When he put the letter back into the envelope, Judge Dee found in it an additional note on a scrap of paper, which Mayor Pei must have added in a hurry in the morning.

  ‘Late last night, I had a talk with Minister Wu. He did not say much about the conclusion, but he mentioned that the empress is also very anxious for a quick conclusion to Xuanji’s case. Speculation about the murder case was spreading like wildfire, with all the sordid details imaginable. Her Majesty did not think that it could turn into anything of positive energy for the maintenance of the social stability of the Tang Empire. So the earlier the conclusion, the better for all concerned. An approval for the execution of Xuanji would be quickly made.

  ‘She could be executed as early as today.’

  So that was the end.

  Judge Dee nodded over the note, stroking his graying beard in a gust of wind.

  After all, people saw a murder case, like anything and everything else in the world of red dust, from their own perspective. And, whether consciously or not, in the light of their own interests, too.

  For Empress Wu, the political stability of the Tang Empire was the top priority, particularly at a time when people were complaining about the traditional social hierarchy being turned upside down with her – a woman of dubious background similar to Xuanji’s – now sitting on the throne. Talk about the Xuanji case with all its spicy details spelled a negative criticism of the current regime, adding fuel to the fire. A quick execution of the poetess with an acceptable, convincing conclusion would therefore prove to be in the interests of the empire, whether she was truly guilty as charged or not.

  Internal Minister Wu might not have been too pleased with such an outcome as he failed to obtain anything from Xuanji’s latest confession that would incriminate Prince Li, but Wu was in no position to argue with the empress, for he had nothing concrete to support the scenario casting the prince as an accomplice to murder. Still, with both Judge Dee and the prince driven out of the capital for the time being, Minister Wu would have more opportunities for the materialization of his ambitious plan. So the conclusion turned out to be not that unacceptable for the moment.

  As for Xuanji, was such an ending acceptable – at least more acceptable than others?

  Because of her ultimate sacrifice – at least so she could have imagined – Prince Li remained undiscovered and untouched. For her, that was the best thing that had ever happened to her in her sad, short life. She believed that the prince cared for her, so much so that he took the risk to visit her in the nunnery, and to help her out with the burial in the backyard that night. It was simply overwhelming for her to finally find such a ‘true-hearted lover’ in the prince.

  She sacrificed herself, not just for him but also for the Tang Empire. It was the ‘right thing,’ as she had told Judge Dee in the prison cell, for her to do – to protect the prince, and to ensure the continuation of the Lis on the throne of the Tang Empire – even at the expense of her life.

  For her, there seemed to be meaning in the loss of herself. It was understandable for a poetess who had been searching for ‘meaning’ all her life.

  But was the prince really such a ‘true-hearted lover’?

  Not too long before his meeting with Xuanji, Judge Dee recalled, the prince had landed himself in trouble for an affair with a palace lady.

  To say the least, the prince then made no effort to help Xuanji in prison.

  No effort whatsoever to visit her or even send her anything.

  After all, it would have been seen as unacceptable for the prince to get involved with a disreputable courtesan like Xuanji, let alone to cast his lot with her.

  Consequently, a total erasure of the relationship between the courtesan poetess and the prince was the order of the day. No traces of it should have been left detectable under the Tang Dynasty sun.

  Hence the fatal ambush by the black-attired horseman on the road so close to the nunnery. It was to recover anything potentially incriminating the prince that might have been left behind in the nunnery.

  Regarding the murder of Wei, it was not likely the prince had directly given the order, but it was far more likely that the people under him had done so – with the prince’s tacit approval. As for the message with the stab wound at Wei’s groin, it could have been done deliberately as a sort of camouflage, but there might also have been another distorted rationalization for it: whatever Xuanji had been, she was one that had been touched by the prince, and, consequently, was untouchable to others. And of course the black-attired horseman could have been sent by Minister Wu for a different purpose.

  And such an ending for Wei was acceptable to the people who were aware, or not, of the conspiracies revolving around the nunnery, in which Wei unwittingly played a shadowy role in his way, wearing the black fox spirit costume in the neighborhood at night, or carrying the cloth bundle out of the nunnery on the last morning of his life. He was nobody. A good-for-nothing nobody missed by no one.

  Judge Dee was not so sure about the flower girl, though. She was innocent, and so young. But as an old saying goes, the fire around the city gate means the death for the fish in a pond at quite a distance, too. People have to put out the fire by draining out the pond water, harmless as the fish there might be. So the young girl came to an untimely end. Things like that happened; it was nothing new or strange to Judge Dee.

  Ironic as it might appear, such a conclusion was also quite acceptable to Judge Dee, he thought, with another wave of unpleasant taste in his mouth. To begin with, he had made an excellent show of the investigation to Minister Wu, who could no longer find any fault with him. On the other hand, Xuanji expressed her heartfelt gratitude to the judge for the ‘investigation’ into her case. It’s the least he could do for the poetess, whose poems he really liked.

  And as a Confucianist, Judge Dee did the ‘right thing’ for the Tang Empire as well.

  After all, there are things a judge can do, and things a judge cannot do. It came like an echo redolent of a Confucian maxim his late father had taught him.

  There were questions he could not avoid asking himself, though. For one, what had he, the celebrated Judge Dee, really done for Xuanji?

  Or was there nothing he had really done for her?

  Out of the blue, the flying-knife note flashed back to his mind: ‘A high-flying dragon will have something to regret!’ The particular hexagram in the Book of Changes, when used as a sign in fortune telling, means that for the people in high positions with soaring ambitions, they could suffer a turn of luck and have something to regret. It could have come as a warning from the divine yet inscrutable providence for Judge Dee to behave himself. And for the prince, too. And then the next sign – ‘A hidden dragon should be careful in its movement’ – perhaps more explicit as a warning, meaning ‘at this stage, it’s too early for the dragon to move, so it won’t hurt to stay put.’ For him as well as for the prince? Ultimately, it had a bearing on the fate of the Tang Empire …

  Judge Dee was getting confused again. A Confucianist, he did not believe in supernatural phe
nomena, but the Book of Changes had been considered as a Confucian classic, and those recurring dragon signs, along with intricate images or patterns in the last couple of days, had proven to be so penetrating into the opaqueness of nemesis.

  Perhaps there were more things than were dreamed of by a bookish man like the so-called Judge Dee, particularly with his brain worn out as old age approached.

  And he was suddenly disgusted with the role he had played in the murder investigation. In reality, he could hardly tell what a role it exactly was. As a Confucian scholar-turned-official in the Tang Empire, he had studied nothing but Confucian classics for the civil service examination, and then as an official because of his success in the examination, he had only the vaguest ideas about being fair, just, or independent when engaged in an investigation like a judge in the shadow of the empire.

  As in the Xuanji case, he wished he could have served as nothing but an independent judge, pure and simple. But that was not possible in the Great Tang Empire. The way he became involved in the investigation was nothing but politics. It was out of the question for a Confucianist official like him to contemplate the possibility of causing the prince any irreparable damage, or the possibility of hurting the interests of the Tang Empire. In fact, he had ruled out the idea from the very beginning. Politics had to be placed above law.

  That was how he had come to suggest to Xuanji a scenario – the first scenario – which did not appear that convincing even to himself. It turned out to be the very scenario that served as the working basis, nevertheless, for the acceptable conclusion of the murder case to be made.

  What’s more, Xuanji herself embraced the scenario, even though she was to be put on the scaffold because of it.

  She was going to be executed anyway, however, as she could have rationalized the ending for herself with the cold comfort that she did something truly worthy for the prince, and for the Tang Empire as well.

  And Judge Dee, too, could justify his work with the fact that the ending, whether he had suggested the scenario or not, would be the same for her.

  Then, why not the ending that would have seemed more acceptable than any other to the romantic poetess in the dark, damp prison cell?

  The curtain was falling for her, the order of the acts

  predetermined in the shadow of the Empire …

  The two lines came out of nowhere in the suffocating carriage. He tried to produce a couple of lines more for a poem while pondering on Xuanji’s tragic fate, and on his ignoble compromise made between politics and justice, but the futile effort began to wear him out.

  He would never be able to write poems like Xuanji; that much he had been sure of.

  And it was also true, as Yang had observed, that he had slept so little last night. It would be a long, daunting, difficult journey stretching out ahead of him, whether he wanted to think about it or not.

  His heavy eyelids closing in spite of himself, Judge Dee thought he might be able to doze off for a short while in the carriage.

  And the monotonous ride on the bumpy road eventually lent itself to a wave of drowsiness, which appeared to be more than acceptable to him.

  Much to his annoyance, a blue-headed fly was bumping in the carriage, buzzing, flipping, humming, and circling stubbornly around his head.

  The carriage space was small, suffocating. He pulled up the curtain and waved his hand about forcefully. The droning ceased. The moment the curtain fell back down, however, the monotonous noise returned.

  He felt terribly bugged.

  ‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’ the fly flew over and whispered in a sweet, seductive voice. ‘I was the one that kept licking her bare sole in that dark prison cell. You stared long and hard at me, I knew.’

  ‘No, I thought it was a small smudge at the arch of her foot.’

  He recalled gazing at her bare feet, smooth and shapely, in sharp contrast to the rusted black iron chain, all the more appallingly alluring.

  ‘The execution order was given just a short while ago. She was so grateful for the ending, in which she believed she finally found the ultimate meaning of her life. So she wanted to thank you again, Your Honor.’

  ‘But I haven’t been able to save her.’

  ‘You have saved the Great Tang Empire.’ The fly abruptly burst into a crazy dance, whirling around. ‘And her beautiful image in the mind of the prince, too.’

  Fly, fly, fly,

  I’m going to die.

  No need to sigh or cry,

  In a peaceful shadow I lie.

  Judge Dee woke up with a start, his palms sweaty with the unsuccessful effort to wave off the insistent fly fizzing in the dream. He found himself disoriented by the confusing juxtaposition of appearance and reality.

  The message he had just obtained in the dream appeared to have been a true one. About her execution, Mayor Pei too had said something to that effect in the letter.

  The carriage was rolling on, a bit more steadily than before. He pulled up the curtain again. The road became wider, smoother, with the distant mountains vividly verdant after the rain. White clouds unfurled in leisure against the horizon. The view looked so enchanting, as if intent on making a spendthrift offering of its beauty to a thankless world.

  A small black animal was suddenly seen shooting along the gravel roadside – possibly a black fox.

  He took out the copy of Diamond Sutra Han Shan had given him at their parting. It was conventional for people to chant Buddhist scripture for the dead, but he thought it would be too dramatic for him to do so for the moment.

  Without opening the booklet, a passage at the end of the Diamond Sutra came flashing back to mind like the fly, and he started weeping, all of a sudden, like a young sentimental man again.

  ‘All the appearances of causalities in this world, therefore, are to be seen like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, or a flash of lightning.’

  POSTSCRIPT

  The Shadow of the Empire is conceived as being written by Inspector Chen during Inspector Chen and the Private Kitchen Murder, which was also published by Severn House.

  This novel is based on a real Tang Dynasty murder case, which involved a beautiful, talented, and luscious poetess Yu Xuanji (844–871). Because of the sensational, salacious details of the murder case, it has later been made into stories, movies, and TV series in China with a variety of interpretations and reinterpretations. The case was recorded only in a none too reliable, tabloid-style book titled Little Tablets from the Three Rivers, with scant details.

  Inspired by the real historical case, Robert van Gulik wrote a gong’an detective novel titled Poets and Murder in the well-known Judge Dee series, and when the novel was published in the United States, it came out with a different title: The Fox Magic Murder.

  In the postscript of the novel, van Gulik wrote, ‘Judge Dee (Dee Renjie) was a historical person; he lived from 610 to 700 AD, and was a brilliant detective and famous statesman of the Tang dynasty. The adventures related in the present novel are entirely fictitious, however, and the other characters introduced imaginary, with the exception of the poetess Yoolan. For her I took as model the famous poetess Yu Hsuanchi [Yu Xuanji], who lived from ca. 844 to ca. 871. She was indeed a courtesan, who after a checkered career ended her life on the scaffold, accused of having beaten a maidservant to death; but the question of whether she was guilty or not has never been solved. For more details about her career and her work, the reader is referred to my book Sexual Life in Ancient China (E. J. Brill, Leyden, 1961), pp. 172–175. The poem quoted in the present novel was actually written by her.’

  A couple of interesting points about Robert van Gulik’s rendition in his Poets and Murder first.

  Judge Dee and Empress Wu were active around the same historical period, but Xuanji wasn’t until quite a number of years later. Van Gulik might not have been able to resist the temptation of putting the most well-known ‘judge’ and the most celebrated poetess/murderer together in one of the most sensational m
urder cases in the history of the Tang Dynasty.

  Nor can I resist the temptation.

  Also, ‘Judge’ and ‘Magistrate’ are the conventional mistranslations or misrepresentations in English regarding the Chinese official positions. In China’s governmental system, there was no separation of the executive and the judicial powers. Dee Renjie, for instance, actually served in a number of high-ranking governmental positions in his prolonged official career, such as prime minister or provincial governor, exercising executive power most of the time, though from time to time he also held trials like a judge in the judicial capacity.

  So it is not that accurate to call him ‘Judge Dee.’ At the time he exercised his judicial power, as a high-ranking government official, he had no choice but to place political interests above law and justice. As in other Judge Dee cases penned by van Gulik, particularly such Poets and Murder, it was a difficult job indeed for Judge Dee to serve as a judge independent of political entanglement in the background. Unfortunately, the lack of judicial independence in the Tang Dynasty remains unchanged in today’s China.

  In van Gulik’s Poets and Murder, however, the Xuanji case is set in the background, and Xuanji is represented as a marginal character, coming very late into the storyline of the novel – in the midst of some other fictional murder cases Judge Dee has to deal with. A more appropriate title, therefore, should have been Poets and Murders.

  The present novel focuses on Xuanji in the foreground with a backdrop of the real Tang Dynasty power struggle around the throne. Any reinterpretation of history cannot but be made in the present moment of history, which may perhaps demonstrate a historical paradox: China changes and China does not change through all these years.

  While the poem quoted in van Gulik’s novel is not in its entirety, the poems quoted fully in the appendix of this Judge Dee story were truly written by Xuanji and other Tang Dynasty poets. The importance of poetry in the Tang Empire cannot be over-exaggerated.

  As often lamented, however, it is near impossible to translate the poetry. The translation can hardly do justice to the original. They were required in the story, however, given the significance of the poems to the fictional murder investigation and in their shaping of the main characters. This is even the case with Chen Cao. Inspector Chen is presented as the author of this story following Inspector Chen and the Private Kitchen Murder, where he has to push himself to the limit with a Confucianist quotation he learned from his late father: ‘a man has to try his hand at the impossible mission’ – which is also said by Judge Dee in this book.