After the usual, official pleasantries at the beginning, the letter recaptured the main points of the talk between Xuanji and Mayor Pei the previous day, which had happened shortly after Judge Dee left the prison.

In a nutshell, she made a new, different statement about the murder case. In accordance with this latest version, she killed Ning not in a drunken blackout but in a jealous rage because that afternoon, when she got back from her shopping, she discovered the affair between Ning and Wei in the nunnery.

For a fairly long time, Xuanji had been crazy about Wei, calling him ‘a true-hearted lover’ in a poem written in the days when the two of them had first met. She believed him to be one capable of playing fine tunes for her poems, saying all the sweet words to her ears, and pledging fidelity to her, not to mention his proving to be a tireless stud in bed. He was poor, but with those ‘visitors’ of hers lavishing gifts and money on her, she was in a position to help him out financially. It was not just men who were capable of buying things for a woman like her; she, too, had the satisfaction of being able to take care of a man like Wei, purchasing all sorts of things for him, including the hut close to the nunnery. Later on, she was disappointed with the discovery that Wei received favors and money from other women as well, but she found herself already addicted to him, physically, if not metaphysically, as in those lines she had composed for him in the moment of their rolling about in clouds and rain in bed. As long as he declared his fidelity to her face, she acquiesced. After all, she, too, had been seeing other men all the time.

But on that eventful second day of the month, Xuanji was in for a devastating surprise. With the maidservant Ning scheduled to leave in the morning, Xuanji went out shopping by herself. Upon her return to the nunnery, however, she was shocked to see Ning still there, running out barefoot, her face flushed and her hair disheveled. What’s more, she saw that a man’s hat – Wei’s – was left on the mahogany chair. When she confronted Ning, the latter mumbled that Wei had come and gone, unable to explain why she had not left as scheduled in the morning. Then Xuanji stepped into the bedroom to a more shocking scene of a pillow thrown on the floor, of a wet patch on the bedsheet, and of a pubic hair curled up on the rumpled bed, which Xuanji remembered having made herself in the morning.