The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik
Page 19
(As it happens, Liang Foo is no relation of the Cantonese widow, Mrs. Liang, and her son who, in The Chinese Bell Murders, were principals in the case of “The Mysterious Skeleton.” But Judge Dee’s raising of the possibility [5.38] is a subtle example of van Gulik encouraging readers to apprehend his protagonist’s experience as a whole.)
There is a further resonance to the recollection of Mrs. Kuo’s suicide. Mrs. Kuo suddenly steps over the balustrade at the top of the crag of Medicine Hill cliff after her final words with Judge, because she knows that he must arrest her for having killed her first husband through the method that she has revealed to the Judge, thus saving the Judge’s career, and even his life. In Murder in Canton, one subplot involves a Persian woman who, believing herself betrayed in love, meets her lover at the top of a pagoda, and then she too steps over a balustrade.
Judge Dee
In Chapter 21, Judge Dee undertakes a formal review of his investigation. He instructs Tao Gan to “note down my list of clues,” and then he proceeds to develop the complex case that can be made against each of the three principal suspects: Governor Weng, Prefect Pao, and Liang Foo. The detective’s generation of multiple, often byzantine “could-have-been” scenarios just before his revelation of the actual “must-have-been” scenario had become a familiar convention in Golden Age detective fiction, but it was not one often employed by van Gulik. It is, perhaps, appropriate that Judge Dee speaks most like a Great Detective in the vein of Ellery Queen or Gideon Fell at the very end of his career as an investigator.
At the end of Murder in Canton, Judge Dee renounces detective work. It is not that his responsibilities as President of the Metropolitan Court compel the renunciation, though van Gulik has had to strain to justify Judge Dee’s returning to detection in all three stories that are set after his promotion from District Magistrate to Imperial Counsellor at the end of The Chinese Nail Murders. Rather, Dee makes the deliberate and reasoned decision to retire as a detective because his methods of detecting crime have become so famous that evil masterminds like Liang Foo can use their knowledge of his methodology to defeat—or nearly defeat—his pursuit of justice. “My methods have become too widely known, and clever criminals can use this knowledge to their advantage. My methods are part of my personality, and I am too old now to change that. Younger and more competent men will continue where I left off” (24.198). This rational choice is then immediately given emotional weight by Chiao Tai’s death. Like the death of Sergeant Hoong, the event is unexpected, but where the Sergeant was killed while away on a mission, Chaio Tai is murdered by Mansur in Judge Dee’s bedroom. Having witnessed Chaio Tai being slain by wound from his own sword, Rain Dragon (thus fulfilling a prophecy that van Gulik had inserted back in The Chinese Gold Murders), Dee kills Mansur. The reader’s final view of the Judge—final in the biography of Dee; there would still be three more antedated novels—is thus of a former detective mourning beside the bier of one of his lieutenants.
Outsiders: Arabs and Tankas
In his postscript, van Gulik reports his desire “to place the judge in an entirely new milieu” (207). Murder in Canton is the only Judge Dee story to take place in southern China. Not only do the local Chinese speak a dialect (Cantonese) that is incomprehensible to Judge Dee, Canton is an active port engaged in trade with southeast Asia and westward across the Indian Ocean. The large population of Arab traders becomes a significant issue in the novel. Persians also supply an exotic element to mix (Captain’s Nee’s mother was Persian), and there are even references to a “white-skinned” people “with blue eyes and yellow hair” living in lands to the west of the Caliph’s empire (6.49). Finally, there are the pariah people, “the Tanka,” who reside on boats in Canton.
THE ARABS
Confronting Judge Dee with the alien customs of the Muslim Arabs was, van Gulik asserts, a primary reason for setting the novel in Canton. The Arab homeland is far away. As Judge Dee declares, “It seems that the Arab tribes have united themselves under a kind of chieftain whom they call the Khalif, whose armed hordes have overrun most of those barren western regions. What happens in those benighted lands on the periphery of our civilized world does not concern us” (4.36), but Dee does worry about the increasing Arab presence in Canton. The principal Arab in the narrative is Mansur, identified as the nephew of the Khalif who, having offended his uncle, has travelled to China to recoup his fortunes. (The Umayyid Caliph between 680 and 683 was Yazid I.) Mansur embodies the dynamic thrust of Islam in the seventh century. He actually mentions the battle of Nehavent (6.49), a landmark in the expansion of the Caliphate. Usually spelled Nahavand, the battle occurred in 642, when an army of 30,000 Muslim Arabs defeated an army of 100,000 Persians, thus leading eventually to the conversion of all of Persia to Islam. (Mansur dates the battle “forty years ago,” which accurately fits the 681 date to which van Gulik assigned Murder in Canton.)
If Mansur and the several thousand other Arabs resident in Canton represent the threat to imperial order in Tang China posed by a rising Muslim tide, Zumurrud (half–Arab, half–Tanka) represents the seductive appeal of Arab “barbarism.” The Imperial Censor becomes so besotted with her that despite his high office, he returns to Canton incognito seek her favors as soon as he can. The financier Liang Foo is also obsessed with her; she is the only woman with whom he can manage sexual relations. And, a final proof of the magnetism of the exotic Arab, Judge Dee’s lieutenant, Chaio Tai, who has always left the expression of carnal appetite to Ma Joong, is utterly captivated by Zumurrud’s fleshly appeal.
On the one hand, then, the Arabs represent a dangerous intrusion of “black barbarians” (a phrase used by Chaio Tai, Tao Gan, and Yau Tai-kai) into the culture of the Middle Kingdom. As President of the Metropolitan Court, Judge Dee is shocked by the number of Arabs in the city of Canton—up to ten thousand—and he devises a plan to enforce an Arab ghetto: “All those Arabs, Persians and what not must be brought together in one quarter, surrounded by a high wall with only one gate that is closed between sunset and dawn” (8.70). By contrast, Judge Dee regards the segregation of the Tanka as disgraceful: “The pariah class must be abolished…. It’s our duty to educate those backward unfortunates, then grant them full citizenship” (13.110). On the other hand, the Arabs represent a fascinating Other. Chaio Tai responds instinctually to Zumurrud’s undulating body, to the music that she dances to, even to her smell: “Chaio Tai now noticed the strong musk perfume that she used; it was mixed with a strange, slightly pungent body-smell. Although he told himself that it was repugnant, at the same time it stirred some elemental feeling deep inside him, made him remember certain wild animal smells of hunting, of sweating horses and red, hot blood at the height of battle” (6.52). Dangerously barbaric and dangerously seductive: these are the two dimensions of the Arab presence in Judge Dee’s China.
The Arab intrusion into Tang China concerns Judge Dee, but van Gulik also inserts into the novel a reminder that China was, in the same period, an intruder itself. The Imperial Censor’s initial, official visit to Canton was to survey preparations for a Chinese naval expedition to Annam, and on the first page of the novel, Chaio Tai watches a war junk sailing toward the fighting that he wishes he could participate in. Annam (= “pacified south”) was the Chinese name for modern Vietnam, and over the centuries, China has attempted to exercise more or less control over that territory. The Tang dynasty was one of the more assertive periods, and the references to an Annam expedition help to balance an expansionist Caliphate with an expansionist China.
THE TANKA
Like “Tartar,” the epithet “Tanka” is now often considered derogatory, and the preferred phrase for the ethnic identity today is Shuishang Ren or Dan Jia (translated as “Boat People” or “Boat Dwellers”). They were apparently a native Yue people displaced as the Han Chinese moved into the southern territories. They were ostracized. Compelled to reside on their boats, they lived by fishing. They were not allowed to marry Chinese or to sit for exams. They were fixtu
res not just in Canton (Guangdong), but also in Macao, Hong Kong, and other south China ports. Zumurrud speaks with some passion about the discrimination suffered by the Tanka, and one of her chief motivations is to have the stigma removed from her own identity.
Crickets
One of the great pleasures of van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels lies in his willingness to integrate elements of cultural trivia into the narratives. The references to cricket culture in Murders in Canton are an example. A singing cricket of the type known as a Golden Bell (Jinling) plays a significant role in the novel. A small cricket (0.8–1.3 cm), the Golden Bell is the prized possession of the Imperial Censor, who carries it with him in a valuable silver cage. Lan-lee recovers the cricket and so provides a clue as to the location of the Censor’s final hours. She actually makes her living selling crickets, both the smaller singing varieties and the larger (2.2–6.5 cm) fighting crickets.
Reviews
Murder in Canton was the last Judge Dee novel to be reviewed by Anthony Boucher (he died in April 1968). His enthusiasm had apparently diminished a little—“Not one of Dee’s strongest puzzles,” but he still offered praise: “the trimmings are pure delight” (“Criminals At Large,” New York Times 20 August 1967: BR30),
13. The Phantom of the Temple
(21 Chapters)
Scene: Lan-fang, Judge Dee’s 4th posting
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants: Hoong Liang, Ma Joong
The Cast:
Ming Ao, a metal-worker
Seng-san, a vagrant ruffian
Lao-woo, his brother
Ah-liu, his friend
The Monk, head of the beggars
Mrs. Chang, Abbess of the Temple of the Purple Clouds, widow of a goldsmith
Spring Cloud, the Abbess’s maidservant
Tala, a Buddhist sorceress
Tulbee, a former Uiger prostitute (Chinese Maze Murders), now married
Lee Mai, a banker and gold merchant
Lee Ko, his estranged brother, a painter
Yang Mou-te, a student who works for Lee Ko
Woo, Tsung-jen, a retired prefect
Mrs. Woo, his wife
Jade, their daughter
Victims: Ming Ao, Jade, Seng-san, Lao-woo
Villain’s motive: greed
A year ago, fifty bars of gold intended to be used to pay the Khan of the Tartars for a team of horses was stolen. Judge Dee happens upon a message that appears to connect the disappearance of the Woo’s daughter, Jade, with the abandoned Temple of the Purple Clouds, located on a hill just outside Lan-fang. Examining the temple, the Judge discovers a head and a body which do not match, and he soon associates these crimes with the missing gold bars. He concludes his investigation by gathering all the principals in the temple’s main hall, exposing the location of two bodies and the missing gold, and identifying the final villain, who is not who he seems to be.
Plotting
With The Phantom of the Temple, van Gulik finally abandons altogether the Chinese practice of having detectives solve three cases concurrently. He might easily have presented the story as three “Cases”: the theft of the gold, the disappearance of Jade, and the corpse of Seng-san, so it seems clear that he has decided to move in new directions.
As in The Willow Pattern, van Gulik opens the narrative with a depiction of a crime, here the murder in the temple garden, with a headless body being dumped into a dry well and a severed head being buried among the trees. The culprits are, again as in The Willow Pattern, a nameless man and woman, and again it is the woman who demonstrates the competence and authority.
As in Murder in Canton, prior to the concluding exposure of the true villains, Judge Dee reviews the results of the investigation with his lieutenants, laying out consecutively the case that can be made against each of the principal suspects. And again, the exercise seems necessary due to the complicated fabric of motives and timing that underlie the series of crimes.
In yet another deployment of detective story conventions, Judge Dee assembles the principal suspects at the scene of the crime, the Temple of the Purple Clouds. This dramatic gesture is a departure from the early novels, where the Judge’s courtroom was the location where the truth was elicited. Van Gulik had done something similar in The Emperor’s Pearl; in that novel, the gathering of suspects in Mr. Kou’s library had been a staged event, with the Judge hoping that a stratagem would compel the villain to expose himself (or herself). The gathering in the abandoned temple does serve to confirm the innocence of some of the suspects, but Dee already knows the identity of the villain.
A key clue in the case can be detected if one of the illustrations to the novel drawn by van Gulik is compared to the map of the temple drawn within the novel by Spring Cloud.
Dee’s wives
Judge Dee’s wives receive fuller treatment in The Phantom of the Temple. The harmony in which they live is depicted, and their three characters are distinguished. The Judge’s First Lady is celebrating her thirty-ninth birthday; she and Dee have been married twenty years. She has had a classical education, and possesses a “strong” personality. She is the one who directs the household (“with a firm hand” 5.40). The initial clue which begins to draw the elements of the case together comes from the Judge Dee’s purchase of an ebony box as a birthday gift for the First Lady’s birthday. The character for “Long Life” that is carved into the jade disc set into the cover provides a crucial clue to the location of the missing gold.
Dee’s Second Lady has “a pleasant homely face” (4.39), and she is responsible for keeping the household accounts. She shows some independence by converting to Buddhism.
The third lady is the Mrs Kuo, née Tsao, whom Judge Dee protected and eventually married after both her husband and her father repudiated her in response to her failure to commit suicide after being raped in The Chinese Gold Murders. She is the artistic wife, accomplished at calligraphy and painting, and is responsible for the education of the Judge’s children. She plays an active role in the investigation when Mrs. Woo uses her to convey Mrs. Woo’s version of her and her husband’s relationship with his missing daughter, Jade.
Buddhism
As van Gulik observes in his Postscript, what the West has designated “Tantric Buddhism” arrived in China during the early Tang Dynasty. Originating in northern India, it promoted concentration upon mandalas and mantras. It was especially noted for its attempt to transcend dualities, especially the male-female duality, and this led to a pursuit of sexual yoga. This development evidently lies behind Lee Ko (actually Yang Mou-te) describing it as a “disgusting new creed that teaches that the intercourse of a man and a woman is a replica of the mating of Heaven and Earth and a means of reaching salvation.” Judge Dee (“being an orthodox Confucianist”) responds, “I know all about those abominable excesses, committed under the cloak of religion. They lead to lechery and dark crimes” (3.21–22). When Sergeant Hoong researches the background of the Temple of the Purple Clouds, he discovers that thirty years earlier, three priests and three nuns had arrived at the temple with the new creed. Traditional Buddhists departed, to be replaced by new Chinese and Tartar adherents. Following complaints about “obscene rituals,” a magistrate had, fifteen years ago, investigated the temple, arrested its Abbot, and banished its inmates. A single Chinese priest and a single Tartar nun were permitted to remain and perform “the old Buddhist ritual approved by the authorities.” Eventually these last two devotees also departed (8.71).
The novel ends with the revelation that the final two devotees have left the temple, but have not left Lan-fang. Tala, the Tartar sorceress, who with eerie accuracy provides Ma Joong with details of the life of the missing girl, Jade, and, equally accurately, eerily predicts her own imminent death, turns out to be the nun. And the Monk, who now acts as King of the Beggars, is the priest. He has never stopped loving Tala, even as she has taken lovers and pursued gold. In the final chapter he laughs at the irony of “the high priest of esoteric love”—a love that should libera
te the spirit—being humiliatingly bound to a woman.
Set against this picture of Buddhist futility are two positive images, one of them within Judge Dee’s household. The Judge’s second wife, attracted by “the simple teachings and the colourful ritual,” has embraced Buddhism (8.76), and Judge Dee has not objected (though neither has he been encouraging). And although the widowed Mrs. Chang, a “fervent Buddhist” who has received permission to live in the hermitage behind the vacated temple, is for a time a suspect, she proves to be a benign figure, who ministers to a wounded constable and expresses a desire to purify the temple after its desecration by “heterodox rites” (20.190). (On the other hand, she does seem inclined to apply the whip to her maid, an inclination which has in prior novels been a sign of greater depravity.)