The Cases of Judge Li

A magistrate who would rather ride out in disguise than sit behind a desk.

A province full of people who would rather he stayed there.

Meet Li Chijun, known to the countryside as Bronze Mace Li: a northern

official raised in the south, a scholar who can shoot the willow leaf at a

hundred paces, and the most restless investigator in late Qing fiction.

About the Book

Li Chijun holds office in a province where the courts are slow, the runners are

bought, and the men who commit the crimes are usually the ones sent to solve

them. So he goes out himself.

Across thirty four chapters he travels the roads as a fortune teller, a pedlar,

a lame beggar, a passing traveller. He sits in wine shops and listens. He walks

into temples where the monks lock the gates behind him and into inns where the

innkeeper is counting a dead man's money. There are strangled brides and

switched corpses, bandit chiefs with private armies, false Taoists, poisoned

medicine, buried witnesses and one investigation that begins with nothing but a

folded garment under a dead man's pillow.

Written in the last decades of the Qing, when the whole apparatus of imperial

justice was visibly failing, the book has an edge its predecessors lack. Judge

Li solves his cases, but the reader is never allowed to forget how many go

unsolved.

About This Edition

This complete English translation presents all thirty four chapters of the

first collection, rendered directly from the Chinese text.

Poems and closing couplets are set as verse, official titles and legal

procedure are translated into clear English, and the storyteller's formulas are

kept, since they are part of how the book was meant to be read. Nothing is

abridged.

Themes and Legacy

• Detection, disguise and undercover investigation
• Corruption of clerks, runners and local officials
• Bandits, secret societies and the failing Qing order
• Court procedure, confession and evidence
• A late flowering of the gong'an, the Chinese courtroom mystery

For Readers Who Love

The Cases of Judge Dee - The Cases of Judge Bao - Seven Heroes and Five

Gallants - The Cases of Judge Shi - Classic Detective Fiction - Historical

Mystery

"He does not wait for the truth to be brought to him. He goes out and finds it."

Meet the original detective heroes of Chinese literature. Long before modern crime fiction, China’s gong’an novels followed brilliant magistrates who solved impossible cases, exposed corruption and delivered justice to the powerless.