The edge of the cup appeared, all of a sudden, to be sharply dented. Rubbing his eyes, he touched it gingerly with his lips in the dimness of the room. He felt so fatigue-laden, not just with the trip that had hardly started but with a lot of other things as well.

For his newly appointed position, Judge Dee had to travel out of the capital to another province, and then still to another. He had left his residence at the center of Chang’an in the morning, and he was now staying incognito for the night at the hostel. The official rank of a circuit supervisor might not have appeared very low to others, but it came as a subtle demotion to him. The Empress Wu had decided to get Judge Dee out of the capital – at least for a short while – with the two factions being engaged in a cut-throat political battle at the pinnacle of power.

Judge Dee had been swept into it because of a memorial he had recently made to the empress, who was debating with herself as to whether her nephew, Internal Minister Wu of the Wu family, or Prince Li, her son with the late emperor of the Li family, would be officially designated as the successor to the throne of the Tang Empire. Like other Confucian scholar-turned-officials, Judge Dee found unacceptable the idea that an imperial concubine-turned-empress would contrive to have someone from the Wu family chosen as the successor for the throne of the Li family, and argued that it was in the time-honored orthodox tradition for the supreme ruler to pick the successor in the son, rather than in the nephew, for the sake of a legitimate, peaceful, and uncontroversial power transition for the empire. While the empress had long regarded Dee as one of the capable, honest officials she could trust, she was nonetheless upset with his bookish argument based on the orthodox Confucian discourse.

To make things worse, the prince happened to have been caught in a scandalous affair with a palace lady. Because of the opposition of old-fashioned officials like Judge Dee, the empress reluctantly agreed not to disown the prince there and then, but she wanted him out of the capital temporarily.

And Judge Dee’s new official post entailed his traveling out of Chang’an.

Was that a coincidence?

Lost in thought against the flickering candlelight by the western window of the hostel room, Dee tried not to dwell too much on politics, staring absentmindedly at the blurred reflection of his worn-out self in the bronze mirror.

Again, it started drizzling outside. The small pool in the back of the hostel appeared to be swelling with the memories of those bygone days. A couple of half-forgotten lines were coming back to his mind in the somberness of the room.

A candle trembling against the night rain, / you travel across rivers and lakes, year after year …