the Cases of Judge Li: A Chinese Detective Classic Late Qing (English Translation)

A magistrate who would rather ride out in disguise than sit behind a desk. >Meet Li Chijun, known to the countryside as Bronze Mace Li: a northern official raised in the south, a scholar who can shoot the willow leaf at a >About the Book Li Chijun holds office in a province where the courts are slow, the runners are bought, and the men who commit the crimes are usually the ones sent to solve >Across thirty four chapters he travels the roads as a fortune teller, a pedlar, a lame beggar, a passing traveller. He sits in wine shops and listens. He walks into temples where the monks lock the gates behind him and into inns where the innkeeper is counting a dead man's money. There are strangled brides and switched corpses, bandit chiefs with private armies, false Taoists, poisoned medicine, buried witnesses and one investigation that begins with nothing but a >Written in the last decades of the Qing, when the whole apparatus of imperial justice was visibly failing, the book has an edge its predecessors lack. Judge Li solves his cases, but the reader is never allowed to forget how many go >About This Edition This complete English translation presents all thirty four chapters of the first collection, rendered directly from the Chinese text. Poems and closing couplets are set as verse, official titles and legal procedure are translated into clear English, and the storyteller's formulas are kept, since they are part of how the book was meant to be read. Nothing is >Themes and Legacy - Detection, disguise and undercover investigation - Corruption of clerks, runners and local officials - Bandits, secret societies and the failing Qing order - Court procedure, confession and evidence >For Readers Who Love The Cases of Judge Dee - The Cases of Judge Bao - Seven Heroes and Five Gallants - The Cases of Judge Shi - Classic Detective Fiction - Historical >"He does not wait for the truth to be brought to him. He goes out and finds it."