21 Ghosts and the Occult in Gong’an Fiction

Gong’an 公案, or “crime-case” fiction, has a long history in Chinese literature and art. As far back as the Qin Dynasty (221 BCE to 206 BCE), one can find traces of gong’an’s origins in bronzes documenting legal proceedings. In the Tang Dynasty (618 CE-907 CE), historical crime-case stories began to appear in literature. The Northern Song Dynasty (960-1279) was known to have produced gong’an oral performances, puppet shows, and huaben 話本 (vernacular novellas), though none from the period survive to this day. It was in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) that gong’an truly flourished. During this period, earlier gong’an fiction was reprinted and expanded upon, becoming one of the most popular literary forms of the era.^[1] Gong’an fiction, especially from this premodern period, is distinct from Western detective fiction, most notably in its use of the supernatural. While Western detective fiction often makes a distinct delineation between the magical and the “rational,” gong’an fiction frequently incorporates the supernatural elements of Chinese ghost stories as pivotal factors in the detective-figure’s ability to solve the case. In this essay, I will discuss two major protagonists of gong’an fiction, Judge Bao and Judge Dee, and the relationship to the supernatural in their respective stories. Due to the very different publishing history of their literary traditions, the two interact with the supernatural in markedly distinct fashions; Judge Bao stories deal with the supernatural as a natural and manageable aspect of court cases, while Judge Dee stories downplay and repudiate the supernatural.

Let us first define a gong’an story. The word gong’an originally referred to the table or bench that a Chinese magistrate presided from during court sessions.^[2] The term would eventually come to refer to accounts of criminal cases, and from there to refer to fictional crime narratives. A typical gong’an story centers around the detective-figure of an official or magistrate, but it does not usually introduce this official until at least partway through the narrative. Instead, it begins by introducing the victim of the story’s crime, then introducing that character to the criminals, before explaining the motivation for the crime and how it will be committed. Only after the crime is committed does the Judge appear, meaning that the reader knows more about the case than the Judge does. This format means that the audience is not focused on unraveling the story’s “puzzle” and potentially solving the mystery before the detective, a common stylistic choice in Western crime fiction. Because of this, clues do not need to necessarily be guessable by the reader, and so can derive from the supernatural or inexplicable. The official investigating the case must be able to puzzle together the crime, but gong’an detectives (especially in Ming Dynasty narratives) tend to be imbued with their own super-human wisdom and insight.

Two of the most famous gong’an protagonists in the modern day are Judge Bao and Judge Dee. Both judges are based on real historical figures, though their fictional exploits have elevated them to a legendary status that reaches beyond any of their real-world achievements. While the legend of Judge Bao exists in written accounts since at least the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), Judge Dee’s popularity as a gong’an character is a relatively recent phenomenon.^[3] We will next examine the two figures and their roles as mediators between both victims and criminals, as well as between the Earthly and the supernatural.

Judge Bao is based on the Song Dynasty official Bao Zheng (999-1062) from Luzhou. Unlike Dee, whose basis in history is mostly a set piece to provide him with a name and a sense of authenticity, Bao’s stories frequently include figures and events from the period in which Bao was an official, even if he did not personally interact with their real-life counterparts. The real Judge Bao was the son of a middle-class scholar-official. He passed his imperial exams in 1027, then spent a decade tending to his ailing parents before entering government service in 1037.^[4] He would serve in various governmental positions for the next twenty-five years, and his reputation for being incorruptible and benevolent to the citizenry guaranteed his legacy in literature. The Judge Bao literature that I will be primarily focusing on in this essay is the collection of Yuan dynasty to early Ming dynasty stories titled Judge Bao and the Rule of Law: Eight Ballad-Stories from the Period 1250-1450, translated by Wilt L. Idema. Though my analysis is sourced from this collection, there are a veritable multitude of Judge Bao stories, plays, pingshu 評書, and more that I could have chosen instead. I chose this collection specifically because, as Idema says, “the ballad-stories on Judge Bao provide us with the most complete and unexpurgated reflection of the legend of Judge Bao in the earliest phase of its development in written literature (1250–1450). While it is quite possible that some huaben and zaju 雜劇 were composed earlier than some or all of the ballad-stories, these texts have only been preserved in much later printings, and the zaju especially appear to have been subjected to extensive revision.”^[5]

The first story in the collection, “The Tale of the Early Career of Rescriptor Bao,” begins by mythicizing Bao. In this narrative, Bao is the son of “Millionaire Bao” and a woman addressed as “her Ladyship,” but at his birth he is so unbelievably ugly that his father plans to drown him.^[6] He escapes this fate, but is forced to become a buffalo plowboy—at least until he receives his fortune from the Great White Star of the Southern Regions, disguised as an old fortune teller.^[7] This prophecy is the most obvious supernatural element of the first story, but the first two stories in the collection are the least supernaturally-concerned of the total eight. The remaining six stories all involve the supernatural in the solving of the crime to some extent, particularly in the stories “Dragon-Design Bao Sentences the White Weretiger,” “Rescriptor Bao Decides the Case of the Weird Black Pot,” and “Humane Ancestor Recognizing His Mother” (though the supernatural element in this last tale is complex, as will be discussed later). A brief discussion of each of these stories will follow, in order for us to understand how the occult functions in a typical Judge Bao story.

The title of “Dragon-Design Bao Sentences the White Weretiger” gives the reader a fairly clear insight into the plot of this first story. In terms of story structure, it bears a striking resemblance to the White Snake legend, especially Feng Menglong’s version Madam White is Kept Forever Under Thunder Peak Tower. While traveling to complete his examinations, a young student meets with a beautiful woman. The two elope, but then the student meets a Daoist priest, who tells him that, “in your eyes, your wife looks like a very pretty woman, but her body is actually that of a white tiger demon. High on the peaks of Precious Cloud Mountain, she has been killing men for thousands, ten thousands of years!”^[8] The tiger, who has by this time fallen in love with her “dear darling husband,” battles the priest, and in a departure from the White Snake legend, actually manages to kill and eat him, leaving only his head and limbs behind. She then runs off in order to protect her husband. It is at this point that Judge Bao is called into the narrative, both by the Daoist priests who found their fellow ripped to shreds, and by the husband, who thinks that the priest warned him about the tiger demon in order to kidnap the student’s wife for himself. With the husband’s main suspect dead, Bao thinks that “there is something quite ridiculous about this case!”^[9] Once he has all the facts, he agrees that the white tiger demon is likely behind the priest’s murder, and so writes up a warrant for the arrest of the demon. This is almost comedic in its straightforward approach to the problem, and that seems to be the narrative’s intended effect, especially considering that the assistants that Bao hands the warrant off to call Bao “muddled as a bowl of noodles” for wanting them to handle such an “awkward assignment.”^[10] The two decide that their best course of action is to bring the warrant with them to the temple at Precious Cloud Mountain, place the warrant on the altar, and pray that they will be able to capture the demon. The melding of police work and religion here is fascinating, especially because their prayer works—they manage to capture the tiger, and after a series of mishaps, the Daoist Celestial Master is called in to behead her. In this story, even though the demon is stated to have great supernatural powers, Judge Bao approaches her case in a pragmatic and methodical manner, just as he would an Earthly case. His assistants have to entrench themselves in the occult to capture the demon, but Bao simply deals out justice. This attitude of Bao’s is the same in the following story.

“Rescriptor Bao Decides the Case of the Weird Black Pot” is in a slightly different style than “White Weretiger,” involving a lot more repetition of key phrases. The crime plotline follows another young student traveling to take his examinations, who is tricked and killed by two potters for his money. They burn his body in their kiln for seven days, where he is transformed into an ugly black pot. Meanwhile, a whirlwind annoys Judge Bao, so he writes up an order for the King of the Winds to be arrested and hands it off to his long-suffering attendant. This is again framed as a somewhat nonsensical action; the attendant (Pan Cheng) complains that “These warrants are only used for summoning people, I have never heard about people who summoned gods!”^[11] While trying to complete Bao’s seemingly-impossible order, Cheng buys the pot, which eventually begins to speak. It reveals to him that it caused the whirlwind in order to gain an audience with Bao and solve its own murder. The blatant supernatural is again treated with efficiency and professional spirit; Cheng writes that “at midnight, the black pot suddenly started to speak, and I promptly questioned it in detail.”^[12] Just as in “White Weretiger,” various difficulties arise before justice can be meted out, but eventually Bao hears the pot’s case, captures the two potters, submits them to horrible tortures to get their confessions, and eventually achieves justice. The way in which Bao himself deals with the case would be near-identical to if the pot was a living person with a complaint, aside from one aspect. The two potters are extremely resilient, both standing up to the most gruesome of tortures. To circumvent this, Bao instructs Cheng to impersonate the ghost of the pot and interrogate the two potters, hoping that their guilt will cause them to give a confession. The expectation that the criminals will believe in and fear the supernatural is exploited both here and in the third Judge Bao story that I will be discussing, “Humanae Ancestor Recognizing His Mother.”

This last Judge Bao story is actually based on historical events from within Bao’s lifetime. “The Tale of the Humane Ancestor Recognizing His Mother” features the characters Empress Liu and Lady Li, both of whom were concubines of the Emperor Zhenzong. Lady Li had a son fathered by the Emperor, who was adopted by Empress Liu and raised as her own son. All of this is historical fact. The manner of the baby-swap is where the story and history diverge. In the story, the Empress Liu is conniving and cruel, and had convinced the eunuch Guo Huai to swap the children of Liu and Li. Through this plot, Liu was elevated to Empress, and Li fell into poverty and disgrace. Li comes to Judge Bao as a filthy old woman to make her complaint. There is no supernatural element in the case itself, and one does not appear until after Guo Huai has been captured. Much like the potters in the last story, Guo Huai refuses to make a confession, so Bao prays to the Gods of Heaven and Earth for a whirlwind and its power. The next scene has “ghostly soldiers,” “divine troops,” “buffalo-headed and horse-faced demons,” and King Yama himself all appearing to Guo Huai. He confesses his guilt to what seems to him to be a supernatural procession, and once he has finished, he is “loudly ordered to shut up.”^[13] It is revealed that the procession was entirely a farce enacted by Bao, the emperor, and his attendants. Guo Huai has given himself away to his captors, and so is ordered to be “boiled in hot oil till he had turned into pulp.”^[14] It would seem that this story devalues the supernatural, positioning it as a method of detection and nothing more. However, the final passage (something that all of these stories share is a final passage imploring the reader to not stray down the path of evil that caused the story’s crime) addresses the reader as follows: “If you secretly harm others, people may fail to see it, but there are always divinities who witness your deeds. Three feet from the earth, they observe you from the air: fool other people as you may, but the gods are there.”^[15] In the end, this story says, the gods always know your crimes; even if the gods in this particular story were a performance, the potentiality of a real infernal tribunal is a present and possible threat. As we are about to see, this approach to the supernatural was not the case in the stories of Judge Dee. Dee’s stories frequently used the same setup of this story—“a potentially supernatural event is revealed to be an Earthly phenomenon”—but they rarely if ever acknowledge the overarching reality of the supernatural world.

Judge Dee is marginally based on the Tang and Wu Zhou dynasty magistrate Di Renjie (630-700), who hailed from Yangqu County, in Bing Province. Contemporary writings on Renjie are scarce, mostly limited to ten of his own writings, but his work as a civil servant was recognized and celebrated in his time.^[16] The major work of premodern fiction based around Renjie is the 18th century 64-chapter novel Di Gong’an by an anonymous author, in which Di Renjie solves three mysteries: “The Case of the Double Murder at Dawn,” “The Case of the Strange Corpse,” and “The Case of the Poisoned Bride.” In 1949, Dutch orientalist and writer Robert Van Gulik translated the first half of the Di Gong’an into English as Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee (later titled Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee). After the success of this first publication, Van Gulik would go on to write fifteen more books starring Judge Dee. Only the first collection was based on a translated text; all the other novels were pure historical fiction from Van Gulik. Much of the modern-day understanding of Judge Dee/Di Renjie comes from Van Gulik’s novels, which present a muddled historicity; as Van Dover puts it, “Dee Goong An is a native Dutch speaker’s 20th-century English version of the first half of an 18th-/19th-century Chinese novel set in the eighth century, and observing 15th-century Chinese customs.”^[17] Daniel Wright refers to the stories as chinoiserie, or “a wholly European style whose inspiration is entirely oriental.”^[18]

In his translator’s preface to Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, Van Gulik explains that there are five reasons why he feels that Chinese gong’an fiction is not of interest to the general Western public. These are: the lack of a sense of suspense that was mentioned earlier (I do wish Van Gulik had lived to see the incredible success of the 1970s series Colombo and other Judge Bao-style inverted detective stories in the West), the intricate detail and digressions, the huge cast of characters, the gruesome punishments of the criminals, and most especially the inclusion of the the supernatural, which “clashes with our principle that a detective novel should be as realistic as possible.”^[19]

Van Gulik did want to stay true to the spirit of the original text, stating that “Possibly it would have had a wider appeal if it had been entirely re-written in a form more familiar to our readers. Then, however, much of the genuine Chinese atmosphere of the original would have disappeared, and in the end both the Chinese author, and the Western reader would have been the losers.”^[20] Still, he intentionally chose a story with very few (Wright counts three) supernatural elements, then downplayed those few even further. A ghost in the cemetery becomes a brief vision, and a prophetic dream becomes a natural occurrence of dream psychology. The third supernatural event occurs in “The Case of the Strange Corpse,” where Dee plays a very similar trick on the story’s murderess as Judge Bao did in “Humane Ancestor Recognizing His Mother.” Here, Dee dresses himself as the Black Judge of the Inferno, but in this story, the performance is treated as purely fictional.

In all 15 of Van Gulik’s original Judge Dee stories, the supernatural (or rather, the potentially supernatural) only appears three times. In The Chinese Gold Murders, a murdered man’s ghost is seen wandering about, and even appears to Dee, but in the end it is revealed to be the victim’s twin brother. In The Phantom of the Temple, several characters see and are menaced by a strange, ghostly woman, who is described by one of the characters as a “horrible vampire.”^[21] Again, though, this “ghost” is revealed to be a living person. Finally, in The Haunted Monastery, Dee himself sees what appears to be a psychic vision, but once again this is a misunderstanding of natural events. In Van Gulik’s original fiction, ghosts always act as a red herring, distracting Dee from the real, earthly solution for the case.

As for Dee’s own views on the supernatural, Van Gulik writes him as respectful but skeptical. As he says in The Chinese Gold Murders, “It would be foolish to deny the existence of supernatural phenomena. […] On the other hand, I am inclined to begin by seeking for a rational explanation.”^[22] This is ostensibly because Dee is Confucian, though as we’ve read, “although Confucians probably had less direct relations with the spirits than did either Buddhists or Daoists, they still thought that deities, ancestors, and ghosts were important and that their needs and desires could not be neglected.”^[23] Extratextually, Dee’s attitude comes from Van Gulik’s own feelings towards the subject, and his desire to not include any of the “fantastic supernatural element” that he felt was alienating to his chosen audience.^[24]

Of course, in the original gong’an texts, the events that Van Gulik viewed as “fantastic” were not meant to be a departure from reality. The natural and the supernatural were closely intertwined to medieval Chinese writers; as Benedetti asks, “can one define a kind of tale as marvelous where the ground rules are firmly rooted in reality (even if it is a particular concept of reality)?”^[25] Van Gulik’s versions of gong’an fiction, while snappy and enjoyable to read, create a modernized, Westernized version of the genre that deliberately ignores its fascinating cultural tradition. Gong’an presented a world where if the wind offended you, you set out a warrant for its arrest. The idea that such a setting “cannot be of interest” to Western readers is a bewildering one.^[26]

Bibliography

Benedetti, Lavinia. “The Supernatural and Chinese Crime Fiction.” Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society Vol. 4, No. 2 (2010): 117-134.

Idema, Wilt L. Judge Bao and the Rule of Law: Eight Ballad-Stories from the Period 1250-1450. World Scientific Publishing Co, 2010.

Knapp, Keith N., “Confucian Views on the Supernatural.” Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook, edited by Wendy Swartz, Columbia UP, 2014. 640-651.

Van Dover, J. K. The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik: the Case of the Chinese Detective and the American Reader. McFarland & Company, 2014.

Van Gulik, Robert. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. Self-published, 1949.

Wright, Daniel Franklin. Chinoiserie in the novels of Robert Hans van Gulik. Master’s thesis, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2004.