So it is not that accurate to call him ‘Judge Dee.’ At the time he exercised his judicial power, as a high-ranking government official, he had no choice but to place political interests above law and justice. As in other Judge Dee cases penned by van Gulik, particularly such Poets and Murder, it was a difficult job indeed for Judge Dee to serve as a judge independent of political entanglement in the background. Unfortunately, the lack of judicial independence in the Tang Dynasty remains unchanged in today’s China.

In van Gulik’s Poets and Murder, however, the Xuanji case is set in the background, and Xuanji is represented as a marginal character, coming very late into the storyline of the novel – in the midst of some other fictional murder cases Judge Dee has to deal with. A more appropriate title, therefore, should have been Poets and Murders.

The present novel focuses on Xuanji in the foreground with a backdrop of the real Tang Dynasty power struggle around the throne. Any reinterpretation of history cannot but be made in the present moment of history, which may perhaps demonstrate a historical paradox: China changes and China does not change through all these years.

While the poem quoted in van Gulik’s novel is not in its entirety, the poems quoted fully in the appendix of this Judge Dee story were truly written by Xuanji and other Tang Dynasty poets. The importance of poetry in the Tang Empire cannot be over-exaggerated.

As often lamented, however, it is near impossible to translate the poetry. The translation can hardly do justice to the original. They were required in the story, however, given the significance of the poems to the fictional murder investigation and in their shaping of the main characters. This is even the case with Chen Cao. Inspector Chen is presented as the author of this story following Inspector Chen and the Private Kitchen Murder, where he has to push himself to the limit with a Confucianist quotation he learned from his late father: ‘a man has to try his hand at the impossible mission’ – which is also said by Judge Dee in this book.

In the first chapter of Dream of the Red Chamber, the novelist Cao Xueqin complains in a short poem, the last two lines of which read: ‘People take the author as crazy; / who can tell the book’s real flavor.’ In the increasingly difficult days in the contemporary China, perhaps the same can be said of The Shadow of the Empire.

Inspector Chen awakes wondering

if it is he who dreamed

of being a butterfly, or if it is

a butterfly that dreams

of being Robert van Gulik,

the manuscript still smelling

of the fresh and fragrant ink

from a fox-tail brush pen

on the desk.

APPENDIX