1. Celebrated Cases Of Judge Dee Sparknotes
2. Celebrated Cases Of Judge Dee Games Movie

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Chinese: 狄公案; pinyin: Dí Gōng Àn; lit. 'Cases of Judge Dee'), also known as Di Gong An or Dee Goong An, is an 18th-century Chinesegong'andetective novel by an anonymous author, 'Buti zhuanren' (Chinese: 不题撰人). It is loosely based on the stories of Di Renjie (Wade-Giles Ti Jen-chieh), a county magistrate and statesman of the Tang court, who lived roughly 630–700. The novel contains cultural elements from later dynasties, rather than Tang Dynasty China, however.

Translation[edit]

The Dutch sinologist and diplomat Robert van Gulik came across a copy in a second-hand book store in Tokyo and translated the novel into English. He then used it as the basis to create his own original Judge Dee stories over the next 20 years. Van Gulik wrote:

This translation is chiefly a product of the Pacific War years, 1941-1945, when constant travel on various war duties made other more complicated Sinological research impossible.

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This novel Dee Goong An is offered here in a complete translation. Possibly it would have had a wider appeal if it had been entirely re-written in a form more familiar to our readers.

The translation was first privately printed on behalf of Van Gulik by the Toppan Printing Company of Tokyo, in a limited run of 1200 numbered signed copies.^[1]

The translation features nine drawings, three copies from old Chinese art, and six illustrations by the author.

'Four great strange cases of Empress Wu's reign'[edit]

As carefully noted in his scholarly postscript, the present book is in fact a translation of only about half (31 out of 65 chapters) of a Chinese book in Van Gulik's possession, entitled 'Four great strange cases of Empress Wu's reign'. Van Gulik obtained three editions of that book – a 19th-century manuscript and two printed editions, published respectively in 1903 and in 1947 at Shanghai. There were many differences between variant texts, Van Gulik considering the 19th Century version the best and basing his translation mainly on it.

The part which Van Gulik translated describes Judge Dee simultaneously solving three difficult criminal cases, culminating with his being rewarded by promotion to the Imperial court (which, Van Gulik notes, was the traditional culmination of a Chinese story about an official). The later 34 chapters described events at the Court (where the historical Judge Dee is known to have been a valued adviser to Empress Wu, though his career suffered various ups and downs).

Based on textual analysis, Van Gulik became convinced that the second part was a later addition written by 'a person of feeble talents'. As stated in the postscript, 'Part I is written in a fairly compact style and cleverly composed. The style of part II, on the contrary, is prolix and repetitious, the plot is clumsy and the characters badly drawn. Further, while Part I is written with considerable restraint, in part II there occur passages which are plain pornography, e.g. where the relations of the Empress Wu with the priest Huai-i are described.'.^[2] Moreover, Part II did not describe a detective investigation at all, but rather dealt mainly with court intrigues and power struggles - and thus did not serve Van Gulik's aim of presenting Chinese crime fiction to Western readers.

For all these reasons Van Gulik decided to translate the first part only. The title given, 'Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee', is what Van Gulik assumed the original work was called, before the second part was added. However, he never actually obtained a copy of that original work or a conclusive evidence that it had existed under that name. The second part, of which Van Gulik so strongly disapproved, was apparently never translated - leaving western readers with no way of independently evaluating Van Gulik's scathing criticism.

Plot introduction[edit]

There are three cases in this book. The first might be called 'The Double Murder at Dawn'; the case describes the hazardous life of the traveling silk merchant and a murder which is committed to gain wealth.

The second, 'The Strange Corpse', takes place in a small village and addresses a crime of passion which proves hard to solve. The criminal is a very determined woman.

The third case, 'The Poisoned Bride', addresses the poisoning of a local scholar's daughter, who marries the son of the former administrator of the district and dies mysteriously on her wedding night. This case contains a surprising twist in its solution.

All three cases are solved by Judge Dee, the district magistrate, detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury all wrapped up into one person. His powers are vast, and some of the things he can do would be manifestly illegal in a Western judicial system - such as grossly intimidating a witness or suspect, up to and including the extraction of a confession by torture. As against that, making a false judgement could be far more perilous to Dee's kind of magistrate than to a modern western one. Exhuming a dead body without proving that the dead person was murdered would be an act of sacrilege which would the cost the Judge his job (which very nearly happens to Dee in the course of the book). If the judge had sentenced a person to death and the executed person prove afterwards to have been innocent, the Judge would be himself executed - having made an honest mistake would not be a sufficient plea to save him. Should an innocent person die under torture, both the judge ordering the torture and all members of staff administering the torture would suffer the capital punishment - and members of Dee's staff urging him to cease torture when the suspect proves obdurate shows that they are aware of that dire risk to themselves.

The three cases offer a glimpse into the lives of different classes in traditional Chinese society: adventurous traders who travel vast distances along the trade routes up and down the land of China, and who are sometimes targeted by robbers and sometimes form dubious partnerships or turn outright robbers themselves; the small-scale shopkeepers and townspeople, who live within a narrow circumscribed life of routine which some find stifling; the gentry of literati, who by long tradition were considered as the land's rulers and so considered themselves.

Any official departure of Judge Dee from the court compound (which also includes his private living quarters) is done with fanfare, accompanied by a large retinue of constables and officials. This approach is sometimes useful - especially when suspects are to be overawed and intimidated, or recalcitrant local officials intimidated into fully cooperating with an investigation. Sometimes, however, Judge Dee finds it expedient to go out incognito and carry out an investigation in disguise. He carries off very well the disguise of an itinerant physician; as Van Gulik points out, knowledge of medicine was expected of Chinese literati. Conversely, Judge Dee is less successful in passing himself off as a merchant, a member of a completely different social class; an observant merchant quickly unmasks him as what he is, a member of the Literati elite. Fortunately, it turns out that this observant merchant is not the wanted criminal; on the contrary, he is an honest merchant, with his own accounts to settle with the criminal, who become a very valuable ally.

Judge Dee acts according to very strict ethics, regarding himself as duty bound to enforce justice, seek out, and severely punish all wrong-doers, high or low. Some remarks made by various characters and references made to other magistrates make clear that Dee's conduct is far from universal among District Judges. Others of Dee's colleagues might have been more lenient with a suspected murderer when he was a member of a rich family and an outstanding student of literature; or would not have exerted themselves to catch the murderer of a 'small' shop-keeper in a minor provincial town; or would have thought more of lining their own pockets than of seeing justice done. Judge Dee's honesty and probity were proverbial - which is why tales were told of him even more than a thousand years after his death.

Literary significance and criticism[edit]

'Dee Goong An is the genuine article, dating from the 18th century and barely modified by the translator to make it intelligible today. Like his modern fictions, it adroitly intertwines three plots and shows the judge and his aides in their now familiar guise. The introduction and notes (including Chinese ideograms for the skeptical) are as entertaining as the tale, once the reader has become a Dee-votee.'^[3]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^'Sotheby's, VAN GULIK, ROBERT H. Dee Goong An'. sothebys.com.
2. ^Robert Van Gulik, 'Translator's Postscript' to 'Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee'.
3. ^Barzun, Jacques & Taylor, Wendell Hertig (1989). A Catalogue of Crime (Revised and enlarged ed.). New York: Harper & Row. ISBN0-06-015796-8.

External links[edit]

Judge Dee, or Judge Di, is a semi-fictional character based on the historical figure Di Renjie, county magistrate and statesman of the Tang court. The character appeared in the 18th-century Chinese detective and gong'ancrime novel Di Gong An. After Robert van Gulik came across it in an antiquarian book store in Tokyo, he translated the novel into English and then used the style and characters to write his own original Judge Dee historical mystery stories.

The series is set in Tang Dynasty China and deals with criminal cases solved by the upright and shrewd Judge Dee, who as county magistrate in the Chinese imperial legal system was both the investigating magistrate and judge.

Dee Goong An[edit]

The Judge Dee character is based on the historical figure Di Renjie (c. 630 – c. 700), magistrate and statesman of the Tang court. During the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) in China, a 'folk novel' was written set in former times, but filled with anachronisms.

Van Gulik found in the 18th-century Di Gong An (Chinese: 狄公案; pinyin: Dí Gōng Àn; lit. 'Cases of Judge Dee') an original tale dealing with three cases simultaneously, and, which was unusual among Chinese mystery tales, a plot that for the most part lacked an overbearing supernatural element which could alienate Western readers.^[1] He translated it into English and had it published in 1949 under the title Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee.

Van Gulik's stories[edit]

This gave van Gulik the idea of writing his own novels, set with the similar Ming anachronisms, but using the historical character. Van Gulik was careful in writing the main novels to deal with cases wherein Dee was newly appointed to a city, thereby isolating him from the existing lifestyle and enabling him to maintain an objective role in the books. Van Gulik's novels and stories made no direct reference to the original Chinese work, and so Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee is not considered to be part of the Judge Dee series.

Initially Dee is assisted only by his faithful clerk, Sergeant Hoong Liang, an old family retainer. However, in The Chinese Gold Murders, which describes Dee's initial appointment and first criminal cases, the judge encounters two highwaymen, euphemistically called 'men of the greenwood', Ma Joong and Chiao Tai, who attempt to rob him but are so impressed with his character that they give up their criminal careers and join his retinue on the spot. (This encounter is recounted in a short flashback passage in the original Di Gong An, taking place when the two are already long-serving loyal members of his retinue). A little later, in The Chinese Lake Murders, a third criminal, Tao Gan, an itinerant confidence trickster and swindler, similarly joins. Judge Dee ends his career in Murder in Canton being promoted to the position of senior Metropolitan Judge in the capital, and his assistants obtain official ranks in the Army and civil service.

Van Gulik also wrote a series of newspaper comics about Judge Dee in 1964-1967, which totalled 19 adventures. The first four were regular balloon strips, but the later 15 had the more typically Dutch textblock under the pictures.

Judge Dee, naturally, is responsible for deciding sentences as well as assessing guilt or innocence, although van Gulik notes in the stories that all capital punishments must be referred to and decided by officials in the capital. One of the sentences he frequently has to deal with is slow slicing; if he is inclined to mercy, he orders the final, fatal, cut to be made first, thus rendering the ceremony anticlimactic.

Other authors[edit]

Several other authors have created stories based on Van Gulik's Judge Dee character.

• French author Frédéric Lenormand wrote 19 new Judge Dee mysteries from year 2004 at Editions Fayard, Paris (not yet translated into English). Some of them have been translated into Spanish (Ediciones Paidos Iberica), Portuguese (Europress), Bulgarian (Paradox), Czech (Garamond) and Polish.^{[citation needed]}
• Sven Roussel, another French author, has written La dernière enquête du Juge Ti.^[2]
• The Chinese-American author Zhu Xiao Di wrote a book about Judge Dee called Tales of Judge Dee (2006), set when the Judge was the magistrate of Poo-yang (the same time period as The Chinese Bell Murders and several other novels). Zhu Xiao Di has no relation to Robert van Gulik but tried to stay faithful to the fictionalized history of van Gulik's Judge Dee.^{[citation needed]}
• Judge Dee appears, along with a fictionalized Wu Zetian, in Eleanor Cooney & Daniel Alteri's mystery novel Deception: A Novel of Mystery and Madness in Ancient China.^{[citation needed]}

Bibliography[edit]

Celebrated Cases Of Judge Dee Sparknotes

By van Gulik[edit]

Celebrated Cases Of Judge Dee Games Movie

The following novels and short stories were published in English by van Gulik. The short story collection Judge Dee at Work (published in 1967) contains a 'Judge Dee Chronology' detailing Dee's various posts in specific years and stories set in these times. Van Gulik's last two books, Poets and Murder and Necklace and Calabash, were not listed in the chronology, as they were written after Judge Dee at Work, but they are both set in the time when Judge Dee was the magistrate in Poo-yang.

By other authors[edit]

By the author Frédéric Lenormand (not yet translated into English)

• Le Château du lac Tchou-an (2004) The Zhou-an lake castle
• La Nuit des juges (2004) The Night of the judges
• Petits meurtres entre moines (2004) Little murders among monks
• Le Palais des courtisanes (2004) The courtesans' palace
• Madame Ti mène l'enquête (2005) Mrs. Dee investigates
• Mort d'un cuisinier chinois (2005) Death of a Chinese cook
• L'Art délicat du deuil (2006) The Delicate art of mourning
• Mort d'un maître de go (2006) Death of a Go master
• Dix petits démons chinois (2007) Ten little Chinese devils
• Médecine chinoise à l'usage des assassins (2007) Chinese Medicine for murderers
• Guide de survie d'un juge en Chine (2008) Survival guide for the Chinese judge
• Panique sur la Grande Muraille (2008) Panic on the Great Wall
• Le Mystère du jardin chinois (2009) The Chinese Garden Mystery
• Diplomatie en kimono (2009) Diplomacy in a Kimono
• Thé vert et arsenic (2010) Arsenic and green tea
• Un Chinois ne ment jamais (2010) A Chinese never lies
• Divorce à la chinoise (2011) Chinese-style Divorce
• Meurtres sur le fleuve Jaune (2011) The Yellow River Murders

By the author Zhu Xiao Di

• Tales of Judge Dee (2006), set in the time when Judge Dee is in Poo-yang (AD 669-670)

By the author Sven Roussel

• La Dernière Enquète du Juge Ti (2008) set at the end Judge Dee's term of service in Lan Fang (AD 675)

By authors Eleanor Cooney & Daniel Alteri

• Deception: A Novel of Mystery and Madness in Ancient China, ISBN0-380-70872-8

By Lin Qianyu (林千羽)

• 狄仁杰 通天帝国 (2010), tie-innovel of Tsui Hark 2010 film: Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, ISBN978-7-5385-4859-4

By the author Hock G. Tjoa

• The Ingenious Judge Dee (2013), ISBN1-493-57691-7

Adaptations[edit]

Comics[edit]

The stories have been adapted into comic strips by Dutch artists Fritz Kloezeman ^[4] between 1964 and 1969 and Dick Matena in 2000.^[5]

TV[edit]

Judge Dee has been adapted for television twice in English.

• In 1969, Howard Baker produced six Judge Dee stories for Granada Television.^[6] These episodes were in black and white and were not a ratings success. English actor Michael Goodliffe portrayed the Judge.
• In 1974, Gerald Isenberg adapted the novel The Haunted Monastery into a television movie, titled Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders. It starred Khigh Dhiegh as Judge Dee. With the exception of the star (who generally played East Asian roles but was of English and North African descent), the movie had an all-Asian cast, including Mako, Soon-Tek Oh, Keye Luke, and James Hong. The writing was credited to Nicholas Meyer and Robert van Gulik.^[7] It was nominated for an Edgar Award, for Best Television Feature or Miniseries in 1975.

Some of Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee stories have been adapted for Chinese TV by CCTV. As of 2012, four different DVD series are available with one series so far with English subtitles. CCTV produced series in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010. The series from 2010, entitled 'Detective Di Renjie' has been produced on DVD by Tai Seng entertainment with English subtitles.^{[citation needed]}

Movies[edit]

• Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010)
• Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013)
• Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings (2018)

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^Wright, Daniel Franklin (2004). Chinoiserie in the novels of Robert Hans van Gulik (M.A. thesis) Wilfrid Laurier University
2. ^Roussel, Sven (2008). La dernière enquête du Juge Ti (in French). ISBN978-2-9532206-0-5.
3. ^Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Chinese Detective Novel. Dover Publications, 1976. Copyright notes, 'an unabridged, slightly corrected version of the work first published privately in Tokyo in 1949 under the title Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee.
4. ^'Frits Kloezeman'. lambiek.net.
5. ^'Dick Matena'. lambiek.net.
6. ^'Judge Dee'. Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2008-05-10.
7. ^'Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders'. Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2008-05-10.

Sources[edit]

• Van Dover, J. Kenneth (2015). The Judge Dee Novels of R. H. Van Gulik: The Case of the Chinese Detective and the American Reader. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ISBN9780786496211. A scholar of American detective fiction explores the historical Chinese figures, the tradition of the Chinese detective story, China and Chinese in American literature, and van Gulik's adaptations.

External links[edit]

• Judge Dee: Character chronology and information about the author(in English)
• The Judge Dee website by Sven Roussel
• Fansite containing detailed publishing history in various languages(in English and Dutch)