The first I ever heard of Judge Dee was from a TV movie I saw when I was living in Hawaii in 1974, Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders. This starred Khigh Dhiegh in the title role and was intended as the pilot for a TV series. The series was called Khan, but it moved Khigh Dhiegh from the T'ang Dynasty to the present. It was not about Judge Dee. Neither was it successful.
I did not realize until two or three years later, when I started finding Judge Dee books in Austin, that the TV movie was based on The Haunted Monastery, one of many Judge Dee stories by the Dutch diplomat and scholar, Robert van Gulik (1910-1967).
In the course of his research, and then while working at diplomatic posts in Japan and China before and during World War II, van Gulik had gotten interested in the long tradition of Chinese detective and crime literature, the existence of which most Westerners were and probably are unaware. Many people even in China and Japan, however, were also unaware of the literature, since it was no longer being produced. Thus, after the war, van Gulik sought first of all to bring its existence to the notice of both Eastern and Western audiences; and he hoped to inspire Chinese and Japanese writers to revive the tradition, rather than just imitate or translate Western detective stories.
His first effort in that direction was to translate and publish in 1949 one of the old stories, the Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee or the Dee Goong An: 
, Ti Kung An in Wade-Giles or Dí Gong Àn in Pinyin -- the "Cases of Judge Dee." The title is somewhat ambiguous since 
, the familiar kôan in Japanese Zen Buddhism, can mean a legal case, so that the title could be Dí Gongàn, "Legal Cases of Dee"; or gong can mean "official" or "judge" (or the feudal rank of "Duke") and àn "case" all by itself, so that the title would be be the "Cases," Àn, of "Judge Dee," Dígong. The second reading looks like the right one, as discussed further below.
The publication of the Dee Goong An did not have quite the effect van Gulik wished, since it did not inspire a revival of the literature. So, he decided to revive the literature himself, by writing the The Chinese Maze Murders. This was published in Japanese in 1951 and in Chinese in 1953. These books were successful, and van Gulik wrote two more, The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Lake Murders.
These all used the character of the same T'ang Dynasty (618-907) statesman and jurist as was found in the Dee Goong An, a real person, Ti Jen-chieh, 
, who lived from 630 to 700. Van Gulik mentions that biographies of Dee can be found in the Old History of the T'ang Dynasty (the Jiu Tangshu of 945, chapter 89) and the New History of the T'ang Dynasty (the Xin Tangshu, by Ou-yang Hsiu and Sung Ch'i, of 1060, chapter 115). The biographies, however, only cover his later career, as a major official in the T'ang Court.
| Provinces | ||||
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| Prefectures | Prefectures | 2nd Class Prefectures | ||
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| Districts | Districts | Districts | Districts | 1 District |
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, the person who was the judge, police chief, and administrator in the smallest unit of the Empire of China, usually just one city and the surrounding countryside. Van Gulik's stories were completely fictional in filling in the details of this early life of Judge Dee, his cases, official postings, family, etc. They were also deliberately anachronistic in using Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) clothing, customs, and culture in describing events in the T'ang Dynasty, seven hundred years earlier. This anachronism, however, reflected the habit of the Chinese literature. It also made it easier to write the stories, since much more was known about Ming daily life than about T'ang.
Van Gulik had actually written his stories first in English, and he soon decided to proceed with their publication in that language also. The English preface of The Chinese Maze Murders is dated 1956 -- after the 1951 Japanese and the 1953 Chinese editions. Van Gulik evidently rewrote the three books slightly for the editions in English, since there is a reference in the Maze Murders to the Bell Murders and a reference in the Bell Murders to the Lake Murders, even though the latter books were written subsequent, not prior, to the former ones. In the chronology of Judge Dee's life, van Gulik at first wrote books from his later life and then moved forward.
Van Gulik continued to write Judge Dee stories until his death in 1967. The earlier books were elaborate affairs that, like The Chinese Maze Murders, etc., covered cases that occured as Judge Dee assumed each of his five successive offices as a District Magistrate. Later stories fill in the details of Dee's career and also gravitate towards a more familiar decective story format, as Judge Dee is not always solving cases in the course of his regular adminstrative duties, operating with his full staff out of his District Tribunal and its Court. This process of simplification culminated with Judge Dee at Work in 1967, which is simply a set of eight short stories from different times in Dee's life.
Judge Dee at Work also happily provided a chronology and bibliography of the stories that van Gulik had written up to that point. A version of that chronology is reproduced below. Gulik subsequently wrote only two more books, Necklace and Calabash (1967) and Poets and Murder (1968), which have been placed in the appropriate period, though it was not clear to me exactly where van Gulik himself would have fit them into the sequence of the other stories -- though Arthur Yin, as discussed below, has worked this out.
When I began finding Judge Dee stories in Austin, the books were scattered around among three different publishers. The Dee Goong An and a combined edition of The Chinese Maze Murders and The Haunted Monastery were put out by Dover Books. The Gold, Lake, Bell, and Nail Murders were all published by the University of Chicago Press. The rest of the stories were issued by Charles Scribner's Sons.
I think that the Dover edition of the Dee Goong An is still in print, but everything else is now handled by the University of Chicago Press (from which they may be ordered on line), which has all the books out in new editions. A recently as 2004 and 2005, Harper has also begun issuing some of the books.
The appeal of the Judge Dee stories is not only that they are good detective fiction but that they also draw on all of van Gulik's vast knowledge about Chinese life, history, literature, and jurisprudence. Part of this involved van Gulik's own unique research into Chinese pornography. Indeed, when van Gulik showed another talent by beginning to illustrate his own stories, in the Ming style familiar to him, he usually worked in a least one nude! It is thus altogether an unexpected, charming, and extraordinary achievement in cross-cultural literature. Shown is van Guluk's sketch of the "smaragdine dancer" of Murder in Canton (p. 79), the tragic and fatal true love of Judge Dee's assistant, Chiao Tai.
The Judge Dee stories have recently been continued by new authors. Frédéric Lenormand has published Le château du lac Tchou-an and La nuit des juges [both from Fayard publisher, Paris, 2004]. In 2006 we also now have the wonderful Tales of Judge Dee from Zhu Xiao Di [iUniverse, New York, Shanghai]. Mr. Zhu is currently a researcher in city planning at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. The Tales uses the framework of van Gulik's stories, captures much of his style in English, and occurs during Judge Dee's time as Magistrate of Poo-yang. I have inserted the book at the appropriate place in the table below. The Tales consists of ten chapters that are each independent stories of particular cases, but the whole is a chronological sequence, unlike van Gulik's otherwise similar collection of stories in Judge Dee at Work. The tenth capter ends as The Chinese Maze Murders Begins, with the Judge on the way to his new posting at Lan-fang.
Mr. Zhu has suggested that there is a reason why the Dí Gong Àn, although ambiguous, should be read Dígong Àn, and that is because it would be rude to use Judge Dee's surname alone without a title. If we are to be as good Confucians as Judge Dee himself, we would want to observe good manners, 
, and respect his dignity. This is van Gulik's own interpretation. In the Preface and Postcript to the Dee Goong An van Gulik uses kung to mean "judge" and at one point even gives 
in characters in a footnote (p.iv -- I do not believe characters are ever given in the later stories, except in the illustrations) to mean "Judge Dee." Even better, the frontispiece of the Dee Gong An names him 
, with the title Liáng Gong translated "Duke of Liang." Here gong has risen to its meaning in the terms of Chinese feudal hierarchy, perhaps the reward of Dee's later career. The earlier Liang Dynasty (502-557) was one of the Six Southern Dynasties.
I have now incorporated dates for each Judge Dee story as determined by Arthur Yin in his essay, the "Fictitious Judge Dee Chronology." This is based on van Gulik's own chronological framework and various references that he makes in the stories, including seasonal foods and clothing and other clues. The principal difficulty in the dating, what Mr. Yin calls the "Key Issue," concerns his tenure at Poo-yang. His discussion of the problem is included here in a footnote.
| The Judge Dee Chronology (date of first editions in English) | dates according to Arthur Yin | |
|---|---|---|
| 663 Magistrate of Peng-lai, on the north-east coast of China in Shantung Province |
The Chinese Gold Murders (1959) | Spring 663 |
| Judge Dee at Work (1967), "Five Auspicious Clouds" | Summer 663 | |
| Judge Dee at Work (1967), "The Red Tape Murder" | Summer 663 | |
| Judge Dee at Work (1967), "He Came with the Rain" | Mid-summer 663 | |
| The Lacquer Screen (1962) | Summer 664 | |
| 666 Magistrate of Han-yuan, on a lake near the capital (van Gulik never mentions the Imperial Capital by name, but the T'ang Dynasty capital was Ch'ang-An, near the modern Xian) |
The Chinese Lake Murders (1960) | Summer 666 (665 in preface to Gold Murders) |
| The Monkey and the Tiger (1965), "The Morning of the Monkey" | Summer 667 | |
| Judge Dee at Work (1967), "The Murder on the Lotus Pond" | Mid-summer 667 | |
| The Haunted Monastery (1961) | Autumn 667 | |
| 668 Magistrate of Poo-yang, in Kiangsu Province on the Grand Canal, which had been built in the Sui Dynasty (590-618) |
The Chinese Bell Murders (1958) | Autumn 668 |
| The Emperor's Pearl (1963) | 5th day 5th month 669, Dragon Boat Festival | |
| Necklace and Calabash (1967 on the copyright page of the Chicago edition) | Summer 669 | |
| Judge Dee at Work (1967), "The Wrong Sword" | probably Autumn 669 | |
| The Red Pavilion (1964, but 1961 on the copyright page of the Chicago edition) | 28th day 7th month 669, Festival of the Dead | |
| Poets and Murder (1968 on the copyright page of the Chicago edition) | 14th day 8th month 670, 1 day before Mid-Autumn Festival | |
| Judge Dee at Work (1967), "The Two Beggars" | 15th day 1st month 670, Feast of Laterns | |
| 669-670, Tales of Judge Dee, by Zhu Xiao Di [iUniverse, New York, Shanghai, 2006] | ||
| 670 Magistrate of Lan-fang, on the extreme western frontier of China |
The Chinese Maze Murders (Tokyo, 1951, as Meiro-no-satsujin; Singpore, 1953, as Ti-jen-chieh-chi-an; in English, London, 1952, but The Hague, 1957 on the copyright page of the Chicago edition) | Summer 670, half year before Phantom |
| The Phantom of the Temple (1966) | Summer 670 | |
| Judge Dee at Work (1967), "The Coffins of the Emperor" | Winter, early 672 | |
| Judge Dee at Work (1967), "Murder on New Year's Eve" | Winter, early 674; Judge Dee at Work says late 674, which would be Western, not Chinese, New Year | |
| 676 Magistrate of Pei-chow, a "desolate district up in the barren north" |
The Chinese Nail Murders (1961) | Winter, early 676 |
| The Monkey and the Tiger (1965), "The Night of the Tiger" | Winter, early 676 | |
| 677 Lord Chief Justice, in the Imperial Capital |
The Willow Pattern (1965) | Summer 677 |
| 681 Lord Chief Justice, on assignment in Canton |
Murder in Canton (1966) | Summer 680; Judge Dee at Work says 681 |
| Judge Dee serves in T'ang Court until his death in 700, during the reign of the Empress Wu (690-705) | ||
A detail in Tales of Judge Dee merits a note. The Judge has an hierloom sword, which we've seen in many stories, called "Rain Dragon" (
). His young son makes a wooden sword he calls "Fire Dragon" (
). The explanation of the name is that he doesn't want it to imply that his sword could overcome his father's sword. The background here is the theory of the "mutually overcoming" cycle in the system of the Chinese five elements. Water overcomes fire, as explained at that link.
Van Gulik mentions in The Chinese Maze Murders that the Chinese gavel is an "oblong, square piece of hardwood of about one foot long" (Chicago, p.315). This is called the 
, or, evocatively, the "wood that frightens the hall [or court]" (Wade-Giles ching-t'ang-mu). Zhu Xiao Di enjoys repeating this meaning several times.
In the judicial system of Imperial China, torture was technically illegal but tolerated because no one could be convicted without a confession. It could then be used with these provisions: (1) Questioning could only be done in open court. Since torture would then be administered in public, the public should agree, from the evidence, that the suspect is probably guilty. If it appeared that an innocent person was being tortured, a riot might result. The Magistrate would be held responsible for the civil disturbance. (2) Punishment would be mitigated in proportion to any suffering inflicted by torture. And, most importantly, (3) if it turned out that an innocent person was convicted, the punishment he suffered could be imposed on the Magistrate. This was called 
(fan-tso), "reversed judgment." The principle is discussed and illustrated by van Gulik in several books, especially the Dee Gong An and The Chinese Nail Murders. Curiously, Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary [Harvard University Press, 1972, character #1781, combination #30, p.255] only gives the meaning of fan-tso as "retribution." In turn, the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary, edited by John DeFrancis [University of Hawai'i Press, 1996, 1999], gives the meaning of fanzuò as "sentence an accuser to the punishment facing [somebody] he falsely accused." This is closer to what we see with Judge Dee, but not quite the same thing.
Birger Nielsen's Robert van Gulik Bibliography
This is the section in Arthur Yin's essay dealing with the "Key Issue" of Judge Dee's tenure at Poo-Yang:
The key issue in the re-evaluation of the fictitious chronology is whether Judge Dee spent one or two summers in Poo-yang, the determination of which seriously impacts the Poo-yang chronology. Both van Gulik chronologies [i.e. in the Preface to Gold Murders and in the table in Judge Dee at Work] establish Judge Dee’s arrival in Lan-fang in Maze, hence his departure from Poo-yang, in year 670.The only argument for Judge Dee’s serving two summers would be the assessment that the events in Maze occurred in late summer or autumn 670. Supporting evidences include White Orchid clad in a single thin robe of white silk, the blossoming orchids, and the opening of a chrysanthemum bud.
Arguments for Judge Dee’s serving just one summer are more convincing. First, his transfer occurred long before his term of office in Poo-yang had expired and was a retaliation by the remnants of the Buddhist clique and friends of the Cantonese merchants following Judge Dee’s actions in Bell. Second, spring or early summer 670 is suggested by the mentioning of a flowering magnolia tree, flowering plants of well-nigh a man’s height, and the soft humming of an invisible bee in Maze. However, the most convincing evidences are in The Phantom of the Temple.
One of the subplots of Phantom concerns the theft of imperial gold a year earlier on the second of the eighth moon in the Year of the Snake (669) when Judge Dee was still in Poo-yang. The almond blossoms at the beginning of Phantom, taking into consideration the northwest location, places Phantom in early summer 670. Since the events in Maze occurred half a year earlier with Sergeant Hoong complaining about the severity of the past winter, Maze cannot be placed in 670 and should be forced to year 669.
In summary, the majority of evidences suggest that most of the Poo-yang events occurred in summer and autumn 669. Moreover, only winter can be ruled out for Maze since nothing in the story reflects a cold climate, and its year is not reconcilable between the van Gulik chronologies and the aforementioned substantiations in Phantom.