Judge Dee and Confucian Justice in Tang Dynasty China

Introduction: A Different Kind of Detective

Readers of conventional American mystery novels may be somewhat taken aback by the contrary assumptions evident in the plots of the Judge Dee novels. The Judge Dee novels are based upon a real-life Chinese historical personage — a Tang Dynasty magistrate — and were only later, in the twentieth century, translated for an American readership. In more conventional American mystery novels, detective protagonists often work outside the law as private hired guns, or at the very least do not function as objective arbiters of justice. Detectives are self-interested persons working within flexible schemas of morality and pay little attention to ethics or theology, unless these ideals form part of the detective's personal creed.

The Judge Dee novels, however, are grounded in a large societal ethical framework of Confucian and Taoist morals, whereby finding the truth is a sacred duty of Dee's office, and great dishonor will fall upon any judge who accidentally condemns an innocent man. In fact, if a magistrate like Judge Dee executed someone who was later found to be innocent, the magistrate himself would be executed. In the pursuit of truth, and as an arm of the emperor, Dee also had to show scrupulous fairness to everyone regardless of the accused or the victim's place in society — even as he remained mindful of his own higher place in the Confucian hierarchy of social status and morality.

Confucian Ethics and the Duty to Find Truth

Confucian morality is based upon ancestor-worship, filial duty, and duty to one's superiors. Thus, when Judge Dee is presented with a mystery, he is not merely confronting a professional obligation in his paid line of work. As part of the imperial judicial system, under an emperor who rules in fulfillment of a mandate from heaven, Dee must discover the truth — he exists as part of the cosmological, imperial hierarchy of order. According to the Confucian schema of ethics, order must be restored. Judge Dee must seek to restore that cosmological order in a moral fashion, with honesty and with an eye upon the truth.

Although beautiful women may throw themselves in Dee's way over the course of the mysteries, he must not satisfy his own pleasures until the world is returned to its rightful state and the truth is revealed. His pleasure must be for justice, not the inferior pleasures of the body — unlike the criminals he seeks to capture. A mystery unsolved is not merely a blight upon society; it has implications touching all human affairs, as it causes a tear in the fabric of how the world ought to function in an orderly manner.

Three Cases and Their Moral Dimensions

Over the course of the collected work entitled Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, several cases are brought to the judge's attention. First, he is called to arbitrate in the murders of two silk merchants at a hotel. Second, he must grapple with the sudden death of a husband at the hands of his adulterous wife. Third, he must confront the horrible prospect of the possible poisoning of a bride on her wedding night by her young student husband. The three crimes in this novel are not related, as a reader might suspect; rather, they are designed to illustrate Dee's prowess and the execution of his beliefs in the service of his office. Their only common thematic connection is the figure of Dee himself, and the fact that all three illustrate a sundered obligation in the Confucian understanding of the world — between guest and innkeeper, and between husband and wife.

In the first case, the owner of the hotel where the two dead men resided is the most obvious suspect. The warden of the town assumes the man's guilt because of his low social status, but Dee does not — he looks instead to the dead merchants' characters and beyond personal prejudice. Although Confucianism is based upon a hierarchy of mutual obligations and respect, this does not mean it is just or right to condemn someone merely because of their low status, provided they behave with decorum. In the second case, the wife's strange behavior eventually reveals her guilt: Dee finds she has taken a young lover to satisfy her desires, in violation of her wifely duties. In the third case, the tension of a new bride entering her husband's family and assuming a new set of duties becomes the occasion of an apparent, mysterious poisoning in which the bridegroom seems to blame.

Conclusion: Dee's Enduring Individual Presence

Investigation of the self — not in the name of psychology, but in the name of self-perfection — is also a key part of Confucianism. One must investigate natural phenomena and the past, and look to them as a guide to one's duties. Dee observes the world around him, consults how it may mesh with received wisdom, and obeys his ethical precepts without clinging to them so rigidly that they inhibit the enforcement of justice. Ironically, although he obeys a creed that devalues individual rights and distinction — placing harmony, moral fidelity, and service above all else — as an individual, Dee remains a striking figure in the contemporary reader's mind, despite the gulfs of faith, historical time, and narrative convention that may separate him from us.