‘A poetess/courtesan entertaining her guests at a lunch party in the nunnery? It’s absurd.’

‘That’s something intriguing in itself. The nunnery was where she stayed, but she’s there not exactly as a Daoist nun. How she ended up being in a nunnery – I would have to do more research about that. Anyway, after lunch, one of her guests walked out into the backyard, where he was struck by a weird scene – a bevy of blue-headed flies buzzing, circling around a spot in a corner of the backyard. Nothing suspicious appeared on the surface. He waved at the flies, which flew away but immediately came buzzing back. He tried several times without success before he leaned down and noticed that the soil around the spot looked newly loosened.

‘Then Xuanji hurried over to his side, sweating profusely, her face bleached of color. It was not a warm day, but she kept on wiping sweat from her forehead.

‘The guest did not say anything about her strange reaction, but after he left the nunnery, he lost no time reporting it to his cousin, an assistant in the mayor’s office, who then came over to the nunnery in the late afternoon with a search warrant issued by Mayor Pei.

‘So they started digging in the corner of the nunnery backyard. To their consternation, it was the body of Xuanji’s maidservant, Ning, buried under the surface soil there. They removed the white cloth that had been wrapped around her welt-and-bruise-covered body, which was not decaying yet in spite of the weather, so the maidservant must have been buried just the day before.

‘Xuanji failed to give any explanation for it. According to her, Ning had told her the day before about going to visit her family for two or three days, so Xuanji went out shopping by herself that morning. Apparently, Ning had not left as she had told Xuanji. Instead, she stayed on and was beaten to death in the nunnery and buried in the corner of the backyard.

‘Consequently, Xuanji was taken into custody, but in spite of the brutal bludgeoning at the courtroom, she insisted she did not know anything about Ning’s death. A couple of days later, however, she suddenly confessed in prison, saying that on the second day of the month, she had gotten so drunk that she started beating Ning for some provocation she could not remember, kicking and whipping her violently until the latter passed out, and then she herself passed out, too. Once she was sober again, she saw there was no sign of life in the maidservant lying cold on the floor.