On the Chinese side, as van Gulik points out, Dee Goong An itself is an exception to the first rule of Chinese detectives (v): the villains are not known (though in one of the three cases, it is the unknown method of the crime that is the principal mystery).3 And while rules 3 and 4—the preference for extensive detail and complex social relationships—apply to Chinese detective novels (and to Chinese novels generally), there is also a Chinese tradition of detective short stories. These appear in two related traditions, one emphasizing didactic value; the other emphasizing entertainment. The first tradition consists of judicial casebooks providing illustrative short stories, such as the Che-yü-kuei-chien, the I-yü chi, and the T’ang-yin-pi-shih. These casebooks date from the Song Dynasty (960–1279), though surviving versions are Ming Dynasty recensions (Waltner 281). Van Gulik himself translated one of these, the T’ang-yin-pi-shih (originally compiled in 1211), as Parallel Cases from Under the Pear Tree: A 13th Century Manual of Jurisprudence and Detection (Leiden: Brill, 1956). As he explains in several of his Postscripts to the early Dee novels, van Gulik adapted a number of the plot devices that the Judge must unravel from Parallel Cases. Ann Waltner describes the common characteristics of these casebooks: “The crimes are located long ago and far away, which renders them less horrifying. The entries are short; their language is relatively straightforward classical Chinese. They are quite entertaining and were, I think, intended to be so. An entertaining manual is of more pedagogical worth than a dry tome” (282).
Parallel to these textbooks there emerged collections of fictional court cases—the Gong An genre. These are the stories featuring the legendary magistrates—Judge Bao (Bao Zheng = Judge Pao), Judge Peng (Peng Peng), Judge Shi (Shi Shilun = Judge Shih), and, of course, Judge Di (Di Renjie = Judge Dee or Judge Ti). Of these, as Starrett noted, the Judge Bao stories are both the oldest and the most numerous. Although he has not, in the West, achieved the celebrity of Judge Dee, the cases of Judge Bao (Pao, Bau) have on several occasions been translated into English. Six Judge Bao stories were translated (“and retold”) by Leon Comber in The Strange Cases of Magistrate Pao (1964). Comber, who from 1952–1958 was the second husband of Han Suyin, cites van Gulik’s “excellent” translation of Dee Goong An and his “entertaining adaptations” such as The Chinese Bell Murders, The Chinese Maze Murders, and The Chinese Gold Murders as precedents for his attempt to bring Judge Pao to the attention of an Western audience. In his introduction, Comber supplies an extended (and illustrated) account of the methods of torture available to Magistrates such as Pao and Dee (19–29).
Yin-Lien C. Chin, Yetta S. Center, and Mildred Ross have translated ten Judge Bau tales in The “Stone Lion” and Other Chinese Detective Stories: The Wisdom of Lord Bau (1992). In addition to translating eight early Judge Bao stories, Wilt L. Idema’s Judge Bao and the Rule of Law: Eight Ballad-Stories from the Period 1250–1450 (2010) provides a 24 page introduction that surveys the current scholarship on Judge Bao. Two Judge Bao plays from the Yuan period (1271–1368) (“The Wife-Snatcher” and “The Butterfly Dream”) are translated in Yang Xianyi and G. Yang’s Selected Plays of Guan Hanqing.
The historical Judge Bao Zheng (999–1062) lived two hundred years after Judge Dee, during the reign of the Emperor Renzong (the Northern Song dynasty). He was known for his incorruptibility, hence his title, Bao Qing Tian (= Pao Ch’ing T’ien), Blue-sky (i.e., Pure-official) Bao. The Judge Bao stories were consolidated in two editions in the Ming dynasty (early 17th century), both relating one-hundred cases solved by the Magistrate. Longtu gong’an (= Lung-t’u kung-an; The Court Cases of Dragon Design, also known simply as Bao gong’an / Pao-kung an) evidently contains some of the oldest Judge Bao stories; the first thirteen present Bao as a righteous judge in the underworld. Baijia gong’an (One Hundred Court Cases) presents its one hundred stories in connected form, as a 100 hundred chapter novel (Idema, Judge Bao xvi). In either edition these Gong An stories are relatively short and simple; characters are more types than individuals; psychology is underplayed: “The major concern of the storyteller is the relationship between the deed and its consequences, but not the connection between the doer and the deed. The criminal’s motives are always instinctive and the resultant actions automatic and determinant. Well-laid plots are rare” (Ma, “Themes” 200). Although van Gulik might adopt specific motifs and devices from this tradition, he will certainly develop characters, motives, and plots that go far beyond those of Judge Bao’s court cases.
For example, in “The Case of the Passionate Monk,” as translated by Leon Comber, a student, Hsu Hsien-chung, has a six month affair with a girl named Virtuous Jade. One night Hsu is unable to make his assignation; an opportunistic Buddhist monk, Meng Hsiu, enters Virtuous Jade’s room and, when she screams, murders her, and steals her jewelry. Virtuous Jade’s father, a butcher named Hsiao Fu-han, appears before Judge Pao and accuses Hsu. The Judge questions Hsu, and learns that he had noticed a Buddhist monk passing by on the nights he was visiting Virtuous Jade. Judge Pao leaps to the conclusion that the monk must be the murderer—“This was the lead that Magistrate Pao had been waiting for” (39). The Judge sentences Hsu to twenty lashes, and then orders his lieutenants to stage a late night performance in which Meng Hsiu hears the voice of the dead girl and two evil spirits from the netherworld insisting that the monk make restitution of the valuables that he stole. The superstitious monk confesses, the lieutenants arrest him, and Judge Pao sentences him to death. Pao insists that Hsu, having seduced Virtuous Jade, promise never to marry, but, when the properly celibate Hsu eventually returns after passing his exams, Pao advises him now to fulfill the Confucian obligation to bear offspring and to take a second wife. Hsu marries, and lives happily ever after.
When van Gulik adapted this story as “The Rape Murder in Half Moon Street,” the first of three crimes presented in the first Judge Dee novel, The Chinese Bell Murders, he retained many of the small details, as well as the essential plot: the father is still a butcher, the daughter is named Pure Jade (the student, however, is named Wang Hsien-djoong), gold jewelry is stolen, the student mentions hearing a monk’s clapper in the night, Candidate Wang receives thirty (vs. twenty) lashes, Hwang San (a faux monk) is caught and sentenced to death. But the development of Judge Dee’s investigation moves in significant new directions. Dee notes Wang’s mention of the monk as “a new note,” but a more decisive new note comes in Dee’s observation of Wang’s long fingernails of the sort “affected by the literary class” (4.42). Dee, unlike Bao, draws inferences from the physical evidence. Long fingernails could not have made the marks discovered on the throat of Pure Jade. Somewhat less persuasively, Dee also uses psychological analysis, concluding that only “low-class utterly depraved habitual criminals” or “rich lechers who through long years of debauch have become the slaves of their perverted lusts” could commit such a violent crime, and that “a studious young man of sober habits like Candidate Wang” (8.69) fits neither category. The Judge devotes half of Chapter Eight to explaining his conclusions to Sergeant Hoong. In order to capture the actual criminal, Dee orders his lieutenant, Ma Joong, to do something more practical than to stage a netherworld intervention from beneath a bridge. He is to disguise himself as a ruffian, present himself to the King of the Beggars, and propose to exchange some stolen silver for gold jewelry of the sort taken from Pure Jade’s room. When Hwang San appears to make the exchange, Ma Joong arrests him in a violent encounter.
Thus, while Judge Dee retains the incorruptible persona of Chinese detectives like Pure-official Bao, as an investigator, he is much more in the tradition of the reasoning agent of Western detective fiction. He analyzes data—physical evidence, verbal interrogations—and then takes pragmatic steps to trap the villain. In Comber’s translation, “The Case of the Passionate Monk” takes up less than eleven large-print pages; there is a rapid sequence of events, ending with Judge Pao re-ordering the life of the student, Hsu, who will now begin a new family while still honoring the memory of Virtu
ous Jade. The final lines celebrate the Judge’s wisdom: “As for Magistrate Pao, he once again demonstrated his sagacity as a magistrate and his regard for the welfare of the people. His fame spread far and wide throughout the country” (45). “The Rape Murder in Half Moon Street” requires four chapters (2, 4, 8, 13), a total of more than 30 closely-printed pages. Van Gulik adds texture to the scene of the crime, to the behavior of the individuals involved, and, especially to the methods (and to the character) of the magistrate. The episode ends on a similar note: Judge Dee re-orders the life of Candidate Wang, protecting not only the memory of Pure Jade as his first wife, but also insuring that he regard himself as the son-in-law of Butcher Hsiao. But before the Judge leaves the courtroom, he clarifies one additional obscure point in case (an explanation of the scratches on the student’s body). As a result, when the chapter ends with “a murmur of admiration rose from the crowd of spectators” (13.109), the popular response is attached directly to an example of the Judge’s cleverness as a detective, and only indirectly to his prior gesture toward restoring proper family relations.
It had been van Gulik’s hope that by exhuming Dee Goong An he would inspire contemporary Chinese (and Japanese and Korean) detective story writers to realize that there was a precedent for a genuine Chinese tradition of detective fiction that could appeal to a modern, westernizing culture. The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Maze Murders were offered as further evidence to persuade the Chinese that it was not necessary or even desirable simply to import wholesale the Western conventions embodied in Sherlock Holmes and his epigones.
That importation had already begun in the early 20th century. The first Chinese translation of a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” (originally published in The Strand in July 1889) appeared in the newspaper Shiwu bao (Chinese Progress) in August and September 1896. It was followed by translations of “The Adventure of the Crooked Man,” “A Case of Identity,” and “The Final Problem.” “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” was translated as third person narrative; not until “The Final Problem” was the story presented as a first person narrative by Dr. Watson. Characters were re-imagined in a Chinese vein. Ann Harrison, the sister in “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” was described by Watson as “a striking-looking woman, a little short and thick for symmetry, but with a beautiful olive complexion, large, dark, Italian eyes, and a wealth of deep black hair.” In China, she becomes a girl of “snow-white complexion” and “gentle glance” (Hung 165). The stories were published under the heading “Translations from British Newspapers,” and seem to have been taken as exempla in the in Chinese tradition of Gong An casebooks. After printing four Holmes tales, the journal, apparently realizing their fictional nature, shifted to publishing “records of real cases and legal discussions” (Zhang 110).
Over the next twenty years (1896–1916), thirty-two Conan Doyle stories would be translated into Chinese, making him “the most popular foreign writer in turn-of-the-century China” (Hung 171). In “A Statistical Survey of Translated Fiction 1840–1920,” Tereu Tarumoto reports that Conan Doyle was by far the most frequently translated Western author, with a total 96 titles translated into Chinese. The next most popular author was the American detective story author, “Nick Carter,” with 40 titles. Other English detective story writers would also be translated; by 1910, they included Arthur Morrison (Tereu counts 13 Martin Hewitt stories translated by 1920), Baroness Orczy (the Old Man in the Corner stories), R. Austin Freeman (the Dr. Thorndyke stories), and E. Phillips Oppenheim. By comparison, Washington Irving was represented by 19 titles and Charles Dickens by 18; 67 Tolstoy titles were translated, 34 Maupassant, 29 Dumas (Tereu 40). The first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, was translated five times between 1904 and 1908; the second, A Sign of Four, was translated three times between 1903 and 1916 (Hung 174).
The instinct to make Western detective stories conform to Chinese conventions remained strong. In fifteen instances, the Holmes stories were given titles that explained away the surprise ending of the investigation (Hung164), thus in some degree satisfying the Chinese Gong An formula that devalues surprise (van Gulik’s first “main characteristic”) and confounding Conan Doyle’s artful efforts to keep Dr. Watson (and the reader) in the dark until Holmes illuminates the true story. Sherlock Holmes became popular enough in China to enter the popular idiom. In his satirical novel commenting upon the state of China at the turn of the century, The Travels of Lao Ts’an (1907), Liu E (1857–1909) has a character seeking assistance in an investigation ask the novel’s protagonist, Lao Ts’an (Lao Can), “Can an ordinary yamen runner handle this sort of extraordinary case. There is no alternative but to ask the help of a Sherlock Holmes like you” (206).
The Chinese writer who made the most capital of this newly imported genre was Cheng Xiaoqing (Ch’eng Hsiao-ch’ing, 1893–1976), who learned English in the YMCA in Shanghai and taught in a middle school.4 During the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, he published or translated more than one hundred volumes of detective fiction (Tam 115). Cheng’s first detective story featuring Huo Sang, “Dengguang renying” (“The Shadow of the Lamplight”) won a newspaper competition in 1914 and led to the publication of a long series of Huo Sang stories. The influence of Conan Doyle was explicit. With Zhou Shoujuan and Yun Duhe, Cheng translated the Complete Volume of Sherlock Holmes Cases in literary Chinese in 1920, an edition that was reprinted over twenty times in the next twenty years (Cheng 208). Huo Sang was known as “The Chinese Sherlock Holmes” and Huo himself referred to his assistant, the journalist Bao Lang, as the “Dr. Watson of the East” (Weisl 18).5 Cheng provided Huo with a Dr. Moriarty figure, “the South China Swallow,” who appeared in the background of many stories. Between 1914 and 1944, Cheng published more than sixty volumes of Huo Sang stories, while also working on screenplays, songs, and translations (including translations of Earl Derr Biggers and S.S. Van Dine).6
Cheng saw the Western-style Holmesian detective story as more than just an entertainment. He argued that the detective fiction could stimulate intellectual development by “expanding the rational faculty,” “developing the mind for argumentation,” and “strengthening the power to observe, imagine, analyze, and think”; it is, in short, “a science textbook in disguise” (qtd. in Tam 118). For Cheng and his emulators, then, the Western detective story functions in the same didactic manner that the Gong An casebooks did. But instead of using short stories to model the insightful wisdom of ancient Chinese judges, Cheng’s stories model the analytic thinking of modern (Western) scientists.
Cheng’s orientation is not naively and solely in favor of Western innovation. If, on the one hand, the detective story illustrates an optimistic view that “the assimilation of western learning has produced a new breed of heroes, who declare war on the unwholesome aspects of the past,” the crimes that Huo Sang investigates in 20th-century Shanghai “are seen, rightly or wrongly, as a result of the onslaught of western materialism and the demise of traditional morality” (Tam 129). It may be necessary to import a European/American-style detec-tive into the city because the city has already imported the sorts of social disorder that those detectives had discovered to be endemic in Europe and America.
Cheng was not, then, a mere imitator of Sherlock Holmes. Looking at the moral and social values embraced by Huo Sang, Zhang Ping sees the detective as belonging to the Mohist tradition, a classical alternative to Confucianism that advocated universal love and peace: “Huo-Sang is an urbanized You-xia [a martial hero] who cooperates with the legal system to preserve social harmony” (Ping 112). Where Sherlock Holmes identifies with the ascendant middle class, Zhang sees Huo as the spokesman for the oppressed. Huo disparages the new capitalism emerging in Shanghai and elsewhere in China. Identifying a banker who has murdered his wife in “The Shoe,” Huo remarks, “Those who dedicate themselves to profit making are vicious and cold-hearted” (Cheng 43). And in defense of his archenemy, the South China Swallow, he observes, “he has never strayed bey
ond the bounds of honor and propriety. Those he thwarts are all the rich oppressors of society, people who know luxury but not labor” (Cheng 182). In these respects, Cheng aligns his detective with Chinese tradition.
Cheng published little after 1949, and lived his final decades in straitened circumstances. The China of Mao Zedong was not receptive to fables of the triumph of an individual’s reasoned solution to an apparent mystery, even if the individual commits himself to the defense of oppressed labor. Cheng’s stories do imitate the Holmes saga in dramatizing the heroism of the detective as an individual. In “On the Huangpu,” Huo Seng declares his credo to his Watson: “As you know, Bao Lang, we have always acted on the fundamental principles of satisfying our curiosity, practicing our spirit of service, and maintaining our integrity” (Cheng 131). The middle principle may qualify as a communal value, but the first and third imply an unreconstructed liberal individualism which lies at the heart of the Anglo-American tradition of detective story from Poe through Hammett and Chandler into the 20th century. With the qualified exception of the police procedural, literary detection in the West is always the prerogative of the individual, and far more often than not, of the unaffiliated individual who does not pretend to be an agent of the state. The detective story as such was suppressed: “The genre was banned during the Mao years (1949–1976), except for Soviet-influenced formulas of “liquidating counterrevolutionaries” and of “counterespionage in which the villain is invariably motivated by political conspiracy rather than by private, criminal aims” (Kinkley 51).
Van Gulik’s hope that his Judge Dee stories would pave the way for a revival of an essentially Chinese detective story, trimmed with a few Western prerequisites was not fulfilled in his lifetime. Leon Comber’s translation of a selection of Judge Bao stories, The Strange Cases of Magistrate Pao (1964) never reached a mass audience and led to no sequels for several decades. Perhaps van Gulik’s most important direct influence was upon Lin Yutang. Lin might have taken up the theme of the resistance of Tang loyalists to the machinations of the Empress Wu without the stimulus of van Gulik’s early Dee novels, but when, in the final third of his novel, Lady Wu (1957), he turns to the role of Di Renjie (Di Renjiay) in combating Wu’s ambitions, he specifically cites the precedent of the Judge Dee detective series: “The famouse [sic] detective cases dealt by Judge Di have been popularized in Chinese as ‘Digungan.’ Some of these stories have been woven together and retold with good effect by Robert van Gulik” (197). Van Gulik returned the favor by referring any of his readers interested in the later career of Judge Dee to Lady Wu (Postscripts to The Red Pavilion, 1964 and Murder in Canton, 1966).
The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik Page 3