The Cases of Judge Liu
The Complete Adventures of the Hunchback Magistrate
He is crooked in the back, plain in the face, and the most dangerous man in the
empire to lie to.
About the Book
Liu Yong, known to everyone as Liu the Hunchback, is sent by the Qianlong
Emperor to govern Jiangning with one servant and a donkey. He arrives without
ceremony, and by the end of his first day he is already hearing the case of Li
Youyi. Over a hundred and seven chapters he never really stops.
This is the great storyteller's cycle of Judge Liu, and it works nothing like a
tidy detective novel. Liu goes out at night in a fortune teller's coat to hear
what people say when no official is listening. A drunkard in a wine shop blurts
out what a month of interrogation could not get. A mother loses her daughter at
a temple and the trail runs from a corrupt monk to a whole network of kidnapping.
Coroners are bribed, witnesses vanish, magistrates are in on it, and the higher
Liu climbs the bigger the men he has to break. The last quarter of the book
leaves the courtroom altogether for a full scale bandit rising, a siege, a
prison break and a manhunt.
What holds it together is the man himself: patient, sly, unbribable, and
completely without vanity, dealing out beatings and mercy in about equal measure
and always to the right people.
About This Edition
This complete English translation presents all one hundred and seven chapters of
the 劉墉傳奇 cycle, rendered directly from the Chinese text of the Chinese Text
Project edition. The original edition skips its own chapter one hundred and four,
and that gap is left as it stands rather than quietly renumbered. Places where
the source contradicts itself, a magistrate given two different names, a
companion named differently in consecutive chapters, are kept as written and
recorded in the translator's notes. Nothing is abridged.
The plain, quick, spoken style of the storyteller has been kept rather than
raised into literary English, because that voice is the point.
Themes and Legacy
- An incorruptible official against a corrupt system, not against single villains
- Investigation by disguise, gossip and patience rather than deduction
- Kidnapping, forced marriage, bought verdicts and the traffic in women
- Banditry, siege and rebellion in the last third of the book
- One of the three great Qing court case cycles, beside Judge Bao and Judge Shi
For Readers Who Love
The Cases of Judge Li - The Cases of Judge Lan - The Cases of Judge Dee - Seven
Heroes and Five Gallants - Chinese Detective Fiction - Historical Fiction in
Translation
"He came to his post on a hired donkey. Within a day the whole prefecture wished
he had come with a procession and less curiosity."
At a glance
About the series
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.
