The progressive thoughts on the position of women voiced by judge Dee in Chapter XV of the present novel are not as anachronistic as they would seem. Since early times there have been Chinese writers who broke a lance for women and protested against masculine ethicsalthough it must be admitted that until the great movement for the emancipation of women initiated after the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912, those progressive views were not very favorably received by the general public. Cf., Lin Yü-t'ang's interesting essay "Feminist Thought in Ancient China," in his book Confucius Saw Nancy and Essays about Nothing (Commcrcial Press, Shanghai, 1936).
The third theater piece described in Chapter XVI, about the unequally divided property, I borrowed from the old casebook T'ang-yinpi-shih; there the solution is ascribed to the famous eleventh century imperial counsellor Chang Ch'i-hsien (Case 55-B). The entire casebook was published by me in English translation under the title T'angyin-pi-shih, Parallel Cases from under the Pear Tree, a 13th century manual of jurisprudence and detection (Sinica Leidensia Series, Volume X, Leiden, 1956).
Just as in the other volumes of judge Dee Mysteries, here also I tried to show on the illustrations aspects of Chinese domestic life that did not yet appear in the others. Thus in this volume the reader will find a picture of a simple bed (Chiao Tai on the flower boat), of a more elaborate bedstead (Tang's death) and of a Chinese smelt oven with a pair of bellows (judge Dee in the temple). This time also I modeled these pictures after Ming-dynasty book illustrations, and the naked women after erotic albums of the same period. It should be noted that ancient Chinese sexual taboos differ from ours in that while our classical fig leaf would have been completely incomprehensible to them, they objected very strongly to picturing the uncovered feet of women, which they considered as highly indecent. Although in recent years this view is becoming dated, I still thought it wise to conceal the naked feet of the women depicted in my novels, with a view to the Chinese-language versions of the series.
ROBERT VAN GULIK
About the Author
Robert van Gulik was born in the Netherlands in 1910. He was educated at the Universities of Leyden and Utrecht, and served in the Dutch diplomatic service in China and Japan for many years. His interest in Asian languages and art led him to the discovery of Chinese detective novels and to the historical character of Judge Dee, famous in ancient Chinese annals as a scholar-magistrate. Van Gulik subsequently began writing the Judge Dce series of novels that have so captivated mystery readers ever since. He died of cancer in 1967.
***
[1] In the year 665 Judge Dee was transferred from Peng-lai to Hanyuan, and thence in 658 to Poo-yang in Kiangsu Province. In 670 he was appointed to the magistracy of Lan-fang, on the western frontier, where he stayed five vears. In 676 he was transferred to Pei-chow in the far north, where he solved his last three cases as district magistrate. In the same year he was appointed President of the Metropolitan Court of justice, in the Imperial Capital.
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The Chinese Gold Murders Page 19