Victim: Liang Ko-fa, disappearance; suffocation
Villain’s motive: revenge
Mrs. Liang appears before Judge Dee asking for justice in a case that stretches thirty years into the past, when she claims Lin Fan committed a series of dastardly assaults upon members of the Liang family. She now accuses Lin of having murdered her grandson. Judge Dee investigates the feud, discovers the remains of Liang Ko-fa beneath a temple bell, and identifies the murderer.
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants
Van Gulik begins to add some individual characteristics to each of Judge Dee’s four lieutenants as he found them in Dee Goong An. Though they will evolve in small, but significant ways over the course of the original novels, the four lieutentants will retain the same basic qualities: Hoong Liang (Sergeant Hoong) is always the deferential confidant; Ma Joong is always muscular, impulsive, and ribald; Chiao Tai is always muscular and a bit reserved; Tao Gan is always crafty and parsimonious.
Scene
Van Gulik set the first novel of the series in the city that what would emerge as the third of Judge Dee’s five assignments as a district magistrate. A total of six novels (The Chinese Bell Murders, plus The Chinese Bell Murders, The Emperor’s Pearl, The Red Pavilion, Necklace and Calabash, and Poets and Murder) and two short stories (“Two Beggars,” “The Wrong Sword”) will eventually be set during the Judge’s posting in Poo-yang, making it by far the most written-about station in the Judge’s career. (Peng-lai, the Judge’s first assignment, with two novels and three short stories is the second most written about.) Poo-yang’s central location on the Grand Canal makes it a scene of great wealth.
Plot
The three cases that van Gulik assigns to Judge Dee in The Chinese Bell Murders present three different sorts of problem. “The Rape Murder in Half Moon Street” is a standard detective-story plot: a crime occurs, a person is falsely accused, the detective examines the physical evidence and the oral testimony and notices details that others miss, the true criminal is identified. Judge Dee’s analysis of the fingernail marks on the victim’s throat, the slight physical stature of the accused, and the second sounding of the watchman’s wooden clapper leads him to identify characteristics of the killer. As van Gulik acknowledges in his “Postscript” to the novel, the plot is based on a famous case solved by Judge Pao. (Leon Comber has translated it as “The Case of the Passionate Monk” in The Strange Cases of Magistrate Pao.)
“The Secret of the Buddhist Temple” presents a situation in which the villain’s motive is known—Abbot Spiritual Virtue is clearly abusing the wives (and husbands) who come to his temple with the hope of curing infertility—and the problem becomes how to expose the imposture. Judge Dee’s solution—instructing a young prostitute to mark the abusers as she endures serial rape—effectively (if, by modern standards, rather heartlessly) provides the evidence necessary to convict the villains. This plot is, van Gulik notes, based on a Judge Wang story. Van Gulik adds that in the original, Judge Wang peremptorily burns down the monastery, reflecting a more severe anti–Buddhist sentiment and, van Gulik observes, “an arbitrary procedure that is not allowed under the ancient Chinese Penal Code” (Postscript 220). This attention to the penal code is not just a pedantic matter of historical accuracy; Judge Dee’s heroism is essentially tied to his close adherence to the protocols of imperial justice, though by deliberately enabling the vigilantism of the Poo-yang mob, his conscience surely draws a fine line.
“The Mysterious Skeleton” has by far the most complicated plot of the three cases. It too has a specified source in a Chinese novel based on an actual 1725 crime. As developed by van Gulik, its origins are distant from Judge Dee’s tenure in Poo-yang in time and space, and much of the detail of the backstory must be covered in a huddled synopsis delivered by Judge Dee to his lieutenants in Chapter 14. Not only did the feud between the evil Lin Fan and the victimized family of Liang Hoong begin fifty years ago, most of the events took place in distant Canton. The Liangs have suffered enough melodramatic misfortunes to fill a gothic novel, and the bald recitation of the byzantine machinations of Lin Fan’s under-motivated malignity strains the suspension of disbelief. After himself suffering a melodramatic near-death when the villain nearly suffocates him and his lieutenants under a massive bronze bell, Judge Dee manages to secure a confession from Lin Fan on the one charge that Lin’s Cantonese allies in the capital cannot use their influence to overturn. And then, on the last pages, Judge Dee reveals to his lieutenants that the final crime of Lin Fan—the murder of Liang Hoong’s son—was not what it seemed to be, that the “Mrs. Liang” who instigated the Judge’s investigation and who seemed to have been driven to madness by decades of suffering was in fact Mrs. Lin and that the murder victim was not Liang Hoong’s last son, but Lin Fan’s (and Mrs. Lin’s) own son.
The revelation comes as a surprise worthy of Golden Age detective fiction, but it has the implausibility that those surprises incur in all but the very best of the Golden Age stories. One of Lin Fan’s evil deeds was the rape of the wife of Mrs. Fan’s brother (Liang Hoong). Judge Dee describes the rape as only “a perverse whim” (25.212); Lin Fan still deeply loved his wife. But although she had tolerated Lin Fan’s other abuses of her birth family, Mrs. Fan could not tolerate this. She abandoned her husband, assumed the identity of her mother, and when she gave birth to the son Lin Fan would never know, she raised the boy to believe that his father was the murdered Liang Hoong. She then set about persecuting her husband, following him from Canton to Poo-Yang where, twenty years later, she is still seeking a magistrate to avenge her. Two years after her son’s disappearance, she appears before Judge Dee to charge that Lin Fan has kidnapped her son. As Judge Dee discovers, Lin Fan has killed the boy by trapping him beneath the bell. When, at his trial, Lin Fan realizes that his persecutor is his own wife, he continues to protect her. And on the day that Lin Fan is executed for attempting to kill Judge Dee and his lieutenants under the bell, Lin’s wife commits suicide. The final twist appeals to a generic convention: the detective’s investigation leads to a persuasive and satisfying conclusion, and then in an epilogue, he reveals that, in fact, the satisfying conclusion is a false one. “The Mysterious Skeleton” strains for effect, overloading the background plot and achieving its final dramatic reversal at the cost of a considerable degree of probability. Van Gulik reports that the plot was “suggested” by an old Chinese novel, The Strange Feud of the Nine Murders. He adds that while multigenerational feuds have not been common in China, the “tong wars” in the U.S. and the “internecine fights of the Kongsi’s” in the Dutch East Indies provide recognizable precedents.
“The Mysterious Skeleton” does add to a defining element of The Chinese Bell Murders: following the model of Dee Goong An, van Gulik presents his Chinese detective with three independent cases. In The Chinese Bell Murders, not only are the three cases unrelated to one another in victims, villains, and by-standers, they each represent a different type of criminal investigation. “The Rape Murder in Half Moon Street” presents a simple problem of drawing the proper inferences from physical evidence and oral testimony to discover the truth: whodunit? “The Secret of the Buddhist Temple” presents a quite different problem: not whodunit? but, how can the villain be convicted? “The Mysterious Skeleton,” with its extended and complex background, presents a compound problem for the judge. He must confirm Lin Fan’s guilt; he must secure a conviction that Lin Fan’s allies cannot use their influence to overturn; and he must not let even his lieutenants know what Lin Fan has actually done until after Lin Fan is executed and “Mrs. Liang” is dead.
Yet for all this evidence of diversity, there are some interesting points of comparison. Elements of each of the three crimes present interesting variations on common themes. Hwang San, the thug who perpetrates the brutal rape murder in Half Moon Street, has disguised himself a mendicant monk. Spiritual Virtue and his accomplices also appear as monks, and they too engage in the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women. But th
ey are sophisticated villains who use well-planned deception to have their way with many women. Lin Fan’s downfall begins with his rape of Liang Hoong’s wife, a rape that involves a deception that draws her to a deserted temple and then the brutality of forced sexual intercourse. “The Mysterious Skeleton” thus echoes elements—deceit and brutality—of the other two cases. Additionally, in both “The Secret of the Buddhist Temple” and “The Mysterious Skeleton,” after having solved the mystery, Judge Dee must secure a just outcome without interference from the political influence that the Buddhists and the Cantonese exercise in the capital. It would be too much to say that van Gulik builds a thematic structural unity into the diversity of his three plots, but The Chinese Bell Murders presents something more than a realistically random sampling of crimes that van Gulik modestly promises in his Postscript: “In most Chinese detective novels the magistrate is at the same time engaged in the solving of three or more totally different cases….In my opinion Chinese crime novels in this respect are more realistic than ours….It is only logical that often several criminal cases had to be dealt with at the same time” (219).
Buddhism
Judge Dee early in the novel declares himself against “the black-robed foreigners from India”: “I will have no truck with the Buddhist crowd” (3.34). But he acknowledges that the Imperial Court “has deemed that the Buddhist creed serves a purpose inasmuch as it ameliorates the morals of the common people.” Far from ameliorating anyone’s morals, the Buddhist Temple of Boundless Mercy in a northern suburb of Poo-yang has been usurped by an unordained priest named “Spiritual Virtue.” He and his followers have turned it into a highly profitable venture in which childless couples pay large sums to have the wives sealed overnight in a room into which a sequence of virile monks, including Spiritual Virtue, steal in order to impregnate them. The Temple then blackmails the couples (or, at least, the wives) into further payments upon the birth of the children. When the fraud is exposed, “the common people” are so outraged by the immorality of the Buddhist crowd that they break into the inadequately defended prison and massacre Spiritual Virtue and nineteen other corrupt monks.
The conditions that permitted this act of vigilante justice were carefully orchestrated by Judge Dee, who also carefully arranged matters so that he himself could not be held responsible for the people’s violent, yet just reaction. He did so because the usual court procedures would allow time for the influence of the “Buddhist crowd” at the Imperial Court to intervene to protect their co-religionists in Poo-yang. In the event, Judge Dee’s demonstration of Spiritual Virtue’s corruption “deeply shocks” the Emperor, and at a private conference, the Grand Secretary of State in the capital informs his colleagues that the Chief Abbot has been dismissed from the Emperor’s Grand Council and that Buddhist institutions will henceforth be subject to taxation. The case of “The Secret of the Buddhist Temple” thus leads to an alteration—a diminishment—of Buddhism in the empire.
A Buddhist clique was, in fact, a powerful new force in the China of the historical Judge Di Renjie. A turn toward Buddhism was a major factor in the Empress Zhou’s drive to establish herself and her new dynasty on the throne. She may herself have briefly become a Buddhist nun following the death of the Emperor Taizong, whose concubine she had been. When she returned to the imperial court as the concubine of the next Emperor (Gaozong), she encouraged the propagation of Buddhism, favoring it for much of her reign over Taoism. Notoriously, once she seized the throne for herself, she took as a lover the Buddhist monk, Huaiyi, whose abusive behavior offended many at her court. Di Renjie, as a Tang loyalist and a Confucianist, worked against the Buddhist influence during his final years as Chancellor.
To support his depiction of Judge Dee’s anti–Buddhist sentiments, van Gulik, in his “Postscript” to the novel, cites the fact that “at one time in his career he had a large number of temples where evil practices prevailed destroyed” (220). The reference seems to be Di Renjie’s suppression of local cults in 688, when he was serving as a pacification commissioner in Chiang-nan province, south of the Yangtze River. The cults were found offensive, however, not because of their contribution to a larger “Buddhist clique,” but precisely because they were dedicated to local figures such as Hsiang Yü, a third century BC King of Ch’u. Di is reported to have had 700 (or, other accounts, 1700) such shrines and temples put to the torch (see McMullen 6–8).
It should also be noted that van Gulik allows a small grace to Buddhism in The Chinese Bell Murders: the property of the Temple of Boundless Mercy is confiscated by the government, and most of the temple is to be razed, but the original abbot, Complete Enlightenment, who had been supplanted (and imprisoned) by Spiritual Virtue and his accomplices, is permitted to resume his religious practices, assisted by a small number of monks (no more than four). Complete Enlightenment has been described as an old, stammering, easily intimidated man, and his restoration to authority in the diminished temple hardly signifies much of a concession to the legitimacy of “the black-robed foreigners from India,” but it does at least allow the possibility of the genuine spiritual value of Buddhism.
Finally, it should be noted that van Gulik himself was not entirely unsympathetic to Buddhism. John Blofeld, a British scholar of Buddhism and translator of several important Buddhist texts (and, as well, of the I Ching), met van Gulik in Chungking in 1943 and sustained a friendship with him until van Gulik’s death. Blofeld, in a letter to Janwillem van de Wetering, asserted that van Gulik was indifferent to “the numinous components of Chinese and Indian religions” (qtd. in van de Wetering 40). But as van de Wetering points out, although Judge Dee remains solidly Confucian in his worldview, and the Buddhists are fairly consistently depicted as, at best, misguided and at worst, as in The Chinese Bell Murders, as deeply corrupt, there are at least three moments in the series when an exemplary “numinous” figure plays a significant role and speaks with distinct authority: Master Crane Robe (Daoist) in second novel in the series, (The Chinese Maze Murders), and Master Loo (Buddhist) and Master Gourd (Taoist) in the final two novels (Poets and Murder and Necklace and Gourd, respectively).
Taoism (Daoism)
Taoism (Daoism), the native Chinese spiritual tradition, receives little better treatment in The Chinese Bell Murders. There are no actively corrupt Taoist monks in the Temple of Transcendental Wisdom, but that is because the temple has been emptied and sealed shut by the authorities. It had served as “the headquarters of a secret, unorthodox sect”; when the authorities had suspended that sect, a number of priests were permitted to remain, reading masses and selling amulets. Two years prior to the action of The Chinese Bell Murders, Lin Fan, who had purchased the temple, a neighboring mansion, and a nearby farm, accused the priests of leading “a dissolute life, engaging in drinking and gambling” and had them evicted. He then used the empty temple as a storeroom for smuggled salt and a hiding place for the corpse of one of his victims.
Confucianism
When he declared himself against those “black-robed foreigners from India,” Judge Dee also made an affirmative declaration for “our peerless Sage Confucius.” In his introduction to University of Chicago Press editions of The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Nail Murders, Donald Lach observes, “Van Gulik also plays down Dee’s strict Confucian view of the world, which included an unshakable faith in the superiority of everything Chinese and a disdain for all foreigners, a steadfast belief in all aspects of filial piety, a matter-of-fact attitude toward torture, and an unrelenting hostility to Buddhism and Taoism” (10). “Plays down” may be a carefully chosen phrase: van Gulik certainly does not make his detective a “Confucius say…” epigone of the cinematic Charlie Chan. And van Gulik did declare that while his Judge would employ some of the five levels of torture a magistrate was authorized to inflict, the tortures would be less frequent and less graphic than in his Chinese prototypes. But, in fact, each of the aspects of what Lach identifies as the strict Confucian view is certainly represented in the De
e series. Dee does have suspects whipped, and even racked. He does express hostility to Buddhists.
But having announced “our peerless Sage Confucius” as Judge Dee’s guiding light, van Gulik certainly doesn’t overplay the sage’s influence. The only mention of Confucius in Dee Goong An is a single reference to the Temple of Confucius in Chapter 19. A Temple of Confucius is a familiar feature on van Gulik’s maps of the five cities that Judge Dee is assigned to in his novels. It is a landmark in Poo-yang, and in Peng-lai, Han-yuan, Poo-yang, Lan-fang, and Pei-chow. Unlike the Buddhist and Taoist temples which appear irregularly as required by the plots, Temples of Confucius (Kong maio) were more austere places, unadorned with the extravagant paintings and statues that shock Ma Joong and Chaio Tai in the Temple of Transcendental Wisdom in Chapter 20 of The Chinese Bell Murders. Temples of Confucius, dedicated to his teachings, not to the man, contained only spirit tablets (inscribed tablets of wood). As a gesture of atonement for the massacre of the corrupt Buddhist monks, Judge Dee burns incense “before the tablets of the Immortal Sage” in Poo-yang’s Temple of Confucius (19.157).
The first Temple of Confucius was apparently built in 454, but it was in the year of the historical Di Ren-jie’s birth that the Tang dynasty Emperor Taizong, acting upon the recommendation of his prime minister Fang Xuanling, decreed that schools in all provinces of China should have a temple to Confucius (Gier). Taizong was especially noted for his promotion of Confucian doctrine as state policy. The specifics of the doctrine may be debated, but they center upon the securing of social harmony through the promotion of filial piety (including reverence for ancestors), benevolence, and the observance of ritual.
The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik Page 9