BOOK: John Keay, "Last Post"

John Keay: Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East. London: John Murray, 2005. (First ed.: 1997.) 0719555892. xii + 388 pp.

Another book that I bought nearly twenty years ago and only got around to reading now. This is a very pleasant and very readable narrative history of the end of Western colonialism in the Far East, from about 1930 onwards, but there are also several chapters (covering the first 1/3 or so of the book) about how those areas had come under Western control in the first place, which I thought was a great idea as it makes the story quite self-contained.

Placing the beginning of the end of empire in 1930 means that there are basically four imperialist powers that are of interest for the purposes of this book: Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the USA. Portugal still had a few small scraps of territory such as East Timor and Macao, but those are pretty much irrelevant; Spain had lost her territories (such as the Philippines) to the USA at the end of the 19th century. As for Japan, I guess the idea is that Japanese imperial presence in the Far East came to an end with their defeat in the WW2 and there isn't really a separate process of ‘the end of empire’ distinct from their simply losing the war, so there isn't much to say about them in a book like this (although we do of course see a lot about how Japan's conquests of former Western colonies during WW2 contributed to the end of Western imperialism in the East).

*

Although the book is mostly about the end of empire, I found the early chapters, about the growth of Western imperialism in the Far East, very interesting as well. It turns out there were a lot of differences between the four imperial countries. The Dutch had had a fairly long presence in Indonesia (though they didn't finish conquering it until the late 19th century; p. 28), and it was very important to them since they had almost no other colonies elsewhere; they cared about it only from a business point of view, invested heavily and made it very profitable to themselves (p. 15–17), mostly by requiring the natives to dedicate a certain proportion of their land (and time) to growing cash crops for the government (pp. 21–22).

By contrast, the British had so many different colonies in the east that “few outside the Colonial Office” (p. 35) could have listed them all; unsurprisingly, many of these were quite new to me. And in a such wild variety of political arrangements, too; there were the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States, the Straits Settlements; there was Sarawak, technically an independent monarchy ruled by ‘White Rajahs’ of the Brooke family; and of course there were treaty ports and concessions in China. Of the treaty ports, Shanghai was by far the most important, initially for trade but later also for industry; all the imperialist powers had a presence there, and their concession, the International Settlement, was an example of the “increasingly collaborative approach” (p. 146) to imperialism.

I knew about the 99-year lease on Hong Kong's New Territories which the British obtained from China in 1898; but it turns out that at the same time they got another lease — Weihaiwei, a town much farther north, on the Shantung Peninsula. They were supposed to keep it for as long as the Russians kept Port Arthur; the Russians had to give up the latter after their defeat against Japan in 1905, but the British stayed in Weihaiwei until 1930, when they finally handed it back to China after some prodding (and with remarkably little fuss). The two British officials who had administered this territory were keen Sinophiles: “Run by a Confucianist with a Buddhist as his assistant, Weihaiwei, it was said, was more Chinese than China” (p. 39).

In the case of France, I was particularly suprised by how short-lived their empire in the Far East was: Keay points out that Ho Chi Minh, the first leader of independent Vietnam, was the son of a minor official in the service of the last emperor prior to French colonial rule (pp. 89–90). One gets the impression that for the French, their empire in Indo-China was not primarily a matter of business and profit, but a means of boosting their national pride and spreading christianity and (French) civilization (pp. 92–3); but despite the fine colonial buildings constructed in Saigon, the French impact on the area was actually very shallow (pp. 99–101).

Lastly, there's the USA, whose colonial presence in the Philippines was even more short-lived, starting only in 1898. I knew that they had been a Spanish colony prior to that, but was now interested to learn that Spain had conquered the Philippines from America and subsequently administered them from Mexico (p. 108). The Philippine revolt against Spanish rule in the late 19th century also had more in common with similar revolts in early-19th-century South America than with the later anti-colonial revolts in Southeast Asia in the 20th century (p. 110). The U.S. was at war with Spain around that time, took over several Spanish territories such as Cuba and Porto Rico, and sort of pretended to have taken over the Philippines from Spain as well, although the Spanish had by then almost completely lost control to the Philippine revolutionaries (whose declaration of independence was simply ignored by the U.S.; pp. 112–13). Apparently the Americans believed that if they didn't occupy the Philippines, some other imperial power would (p. 115), which I guess is entirely possible. Although U.S. presence on the Philippines started with a nasty military campaign to suppress the independence movement, relations got better later on, and the Filipinos, especially their elites, became heavily Americanized (p. 119). The U.S. was in principle committed to Philippine independence at some vague indefinite point in the future, and meanwhile gave them favourable access to U.S. markets (pp. 119–20). In 1933 they promised independence in ten years, and the Philippines indeed became independent after the war, in 1946 (p. 187).

William Taft, who would later become famous as the fattest president in U.S. history, spent some time on the Philippines to help organize a civilian government there: “Taft was chiefly remarkable for a stature which rivalled that of most Filipino homes and a 325 lb bulk which exceeded that of entire Filipino families.” :))) (P. 118.)

*

The Great Depression apparently hit southeast Asia pretty badly; the economic slump brought in its wake higher taxation and labour unrest (pp. 128–33); “[t]he myth of colonial prosperity was wrecked by the depression” (p. 4). Nationalist movements emerged and began calling for an end of colonial rule; but probably they would have emerged sooner or later anyway, regardless of the economy.

China, which had of course never really been colonized by the imperialists, was already governed by a nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, who was pushing for a return of the concessions (such as those in Shanghai) under Chinese control, and might have achieved this had the process not been interrupted by the Japanese aggression on China in 1931 (p. 151). The Shanghai concession “rested on bluff” (p. 142) — the imperialist powers had no realistic way of protecting it against the forces which now loomed around it. For a time the bluff worked; in 1931, fighting reached Shanghai but stopped on the borders of the International Settlement, whose inhabitants would gawk at the fighting “[f]rom their roof-tops and verandas” (p. 152). But when the Sino-Japanese conflict escalated into a full-blown war in 1937, “the spell of imperial inviolability” (p. 155) was broken; the settlement got bombed, it had to accept an increasing amount of Japanese control, and its economy declined so much that there was hardly any point in its continued existence (p. 156). Imperial presence in China (except in Hong Kong) was simply swept away in the first couple of years of the war.

Japan's war against China didn't go as well as the Japanese had expected, which led them to increase their war aims so as to justify this unexpectedly large and hard war; they now wanted a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” covering the whole Far East (p. 161). This put them on a course for conflict with the Western powers, who were in any case busy with the war in Europe and weren't really in a position to defend their Far Eastern colonies well. Previously Japan had depended on resources imported from the U.S., but the latter now imposed an embargo and Japan pushed into southeast Asia to secure such things as rubber from Malaya and oil from Indonesia (p. 168). Colonial administrations there were embarrassingly easily swept away; the myth “of imperial invincibility was exploded” (p. 4). In French Indo-China it was even easier; Vichy France maintained neutrality towards Japan and yielded to Japanese demands without a fight, e.g. allowing Japan to station troops in Vietnam (p. 166). On the Philippines, the Americans had ambitious plans to defend the islands, but this went badly and they had to abandon most of the territory quickly (pp. 189–90).

General MacArthur, who led the unsuccessful defense of the Philippines in 1941–2, went to considerable lengths to liberate them speedily in 1944–5. As a result, he was enormously popular there (pp. 194–5), and so was the U.S. as a whole: the Philippines became independent in 1946, but kept very close ties to the U.S., and “nowhere in the East [. . .] did the ex-colonial power enjoy greater popularity” (p. 197).

But in countries where the imperial powers intended to re-establish colonial rule, things would not be so easy. Many of these territories were still occupied by Japanese forces when Japan surrendered, which deprived the Dutch, British and French of restoring their colonial prestige by liberating their ex-colonies in a triumphant campaign (p. 213). Moreover, late in the war, Japan had begun promoting the notion of future independence in such occupied countries as Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines etc., with the idea that they would be Japanese puppet-states, or “at least not anti-Japanese” in case Japan lost the war (p. 208). Nationalist movements in Indonesia and north Vietnam declared independence at the end of the war (pp. 210, 219). The former colonial powers would have to wage wars on them to re-establish control; but they were weakened after the WW2 and could hardly expect the U.S. to help them regain their colonial empires.

In Malaya, the British fared a bit better since the country was too ethnically divided for a nationalist movement to have emerged (p. 229); the native Malays were in danger of becoming a minority amidst all the Indian and Chinese immigrants (known as “Malayans”). Moreover, the British empire in the Far East had been attractive and profitable because of “India's eastern trade” (p. 242), and there was little point in trying to hold on to it once India became independent. “Like one stricken with senile impotence, the British found that losing the means to perform coincided with losing the inclination.” :)))) (P. 243.)

By contrast, the French regarded Indo-China as “part of France; their inhabitants could become French citizens, their deputies sat in the French government” (p. 244), and they also saw their colonies as the key to restoring their great power status (p. 275); and the Netherlands needed its colonies for its post-WW2 recovery “and to avoid, as one Dutch statesman put it, ‘becoming another Denmark’ ” :)) (p. 245). These two countries therefore resisted demands for colonial self-government or independence, or at best tried to deflect them by offering to establish vague unions of the metropole and the colonies, in which the former would always have the upper hand (pp. 261, 275).

The situation in Indonesia struck me as particularly bizarre. The nationalist movement obtained Japanese weapons and was in control of the country; in some places former Dutch prisoners now had to stay in their camps under Japanese guard “for their own safety”, due to all the nationalist militias rampaging outside — how embarrassing :)); and occasionally the Japanese, having surrendered, then fought alongside the British against the nationalists (pp. 250–2). The British troops, which were mostly from India, withdrew in late 1947; the Dutch kept fighting but came under heavy international pressure as aggressors against the “Indonesian Republic” (p. 263). The U.S. had reluctantly tolerated the re-establishment of colonial rule on the theory that it helped prevent the spread of communism, but once it became clear that the Indonesian Republic is heavily anti-communist itself, the U.S. withdrew its support of the Dutch and threatened to cut them out of the Marshall Plan; hence they finally caved in and recognized Indonesian independence (pp. 268–9).

The French fought in Vietnam for a few years, relying to a considerable extent on American equipment (pp. 270–4); for some time they negotiated with Ho Chi Minh about the establishment of a French-Vietnamese union, but refused to offer any real autonomy to Vietnam, so that Ho Chi Minh's policy of moderation and negotiation with France was discredited (pp. 283–5). Hitherto the war hadn't mattered much to anyone outside France and Vietnam, but this began to change after the latter gained the support of China and the USSR (p. 291); now the war became part of “America's global crusade against Communism” (p. 292). After the defeat at Dien Bien Phu (1954), the French agreed to partition the country and withdraw from (communist-controlled) North Vietnam; and the U.S. was now propping up South Vietnam, so there was no further role for France there (pp. 295–6). Soon South Vietnam received “more than half of its total revenue” in the form of U.S. aid (p. 347); more and more U.S. equipment and soldiers were being shipped in, and in 1965 the U.S. entered the war in earnest (p. 352). Their public opinion soon grew tired of it, the U.S. withdrew in 1972, and South Vietnam collapsed by 1975 (p. 353).

There was also a communist insurgency in Malaya around 1950, but the British managed to suppress it, partly by wisely minimizing civilian casualties (p. 308) and partly by committing to Malay independence and presenting communism as a common enemy to Malay nationalists (p. 302). Malaya became independent in 1957 and merged with a few other states into Malaysia a few years later — a much smoother transition to independence than in Vietnam (pp. 303, 320). There were even some areas that didn't want independence, such as Penang (p. 316), a region in Malaya; nor were the people of Sarawak happy when the last White Rajah ceded the territory to Britain (p. 239).

The last bit of empire to be surrendered was Hong Kong; the lease on the New Territories ran out in 1997, and the rest of the colony (which had in principle been ceded to Britain permanently) would be unviable without them; moreover China demanded the whole of Hong Kong, and Britain wasn't really in a position to prevent them from doing so. As is well known, the only concession that the British were able to obtain from China was a promise to maintain democracy in Hong Kong for fifty years (p. 364). Keay, writing soon after these events, seems to have regarded this arrangement with a certain amount of optimism, but as we now know, the Chinese broke their promise before even half of the fifty-year period was over.

*

An interesting observation from p. 274: after the WW2, “empire as a mechanism of control was ending because ease of communication was making it obsolete”, e.g. due to the spread of air travel. You could still do imperialism, but didn't have to maintain “elaborate administrative structures and far-flung military establishments”. — U.S. interventions in the Philippines in the '50s (to suppress a communist insurgency; pp. 336–41) or Vietnam in the '60s were a typical case of imperialism, even though they didn't involve “the colouring-in of world maps, the monarch's head on colonial currencies and postage stamps” etc. (p. 335). Old-school empire was simply “outdated” (ibid.). Another sense in which empire is now obsolete is that the sort of wars required to maintain it are unacceptable to Western public opinion (p. 355), which makes these wars politically insupportable (as long as the countries are democratic, at least).

*

Looking back, I can't help but be surprised at how quick and easy the end of Western imperialism in the Far East was. Who would have thought, in 1930, that in little more than twenty years it would all be over? When you look at maps of the world in the Age of Imperialism, with huge swathes of the planet painted pink, blue, etc. to signify the British, French etc. empires, it's hard to resist the temptation to think that such huge empires must have been enormously powerful; and yet they all turned out to have been mere houses of cards, completely unable to preserve themselves, collapsing ignominiously at the slightest push as soon as they were dealing with anything other than literal spear-chucking natives. I think this fact, just how weak these empires really were, is not emphasized enough in education today, and this gives us an unrealistic idea as to just what is possible for a country to accomplish if it sets its mind to it.

Another proof of just how weak the imperialists really were is the fact that they never managed to colonize any substantial parts of China, and never even seriously tried to. Even in the 19th century when they actually won a few wars against China, none of those were proper wars of conquest; and when they won, all they got was just leases here and concessions there, nothing that China couldn't easily claim back once she ceased to be weak. It is telling that the only imperialist country that managed to conquer any substantial amount of Chinese territory was Japan with her conquest of Manchuria, probably due to the advantage of geographical proximity. That famous old cartoon of imperialist powers carving up China turned out to be a mere illusion. I wonder how different the world would be today if China *had* been properly colonized. In that hypothetical scenario, would the China of today be less dangerous and harmful than she is here in the real timeline, with its size, power and malignant authoritarianism? If the imperalist powers had really carved China up, there might be several independent countries there now, smaller and hence less dangerous and less harmful.

Another interesting hypothetical scenario: obviously the WW2 had a big effect towards speeding up the end of imperialism in the Far East, but it's tempting to speculate how things would have developed if the WW2 hadn't taken place, or if the imperialist powers had been able to reassert control after the war — perhaps with American help, if the U.S. hadn't been so heavily opposed to traditional colonial empires at the time. But I suspect that even then, the end of empire could only have been delayed by a few decades, rather than really prevented. Once the whole population of a colony becomes politically conscious and is completely opposed to your colonial rule, what are you going to do? You'd have to have a spy in every street, a squad of soldiers on every corner, send millions of people to prison camps, pile up mountains of skulls, raze villages and cities to the ground. It is certainly possible to control a hostile subject population that way. Many conquerors have done it over the course of history; China's treatment of the Uyghurs is a recent case in point, as is Russia's treatment of the parts of the Ukraine that they are presently occupying. But by the mid-20th century the western powers, and especially their public opinion, didn't have the stomach for that sort of thing any more; and without that you can't do old-style imperialism with any success, and there's no point in even trying. It may even be objectively true that you'd be bringing a better administration to the primitive inhabitants of your colony, but they won't appreciate it, and your efforts will be wasted.

ToRead:

Keay mentions a great many very interesting-sounding books, especially memoirs of people who were involved in the events discussed in this book.

• Hickmann Powell: The Last Paradise (1930). A book about Bali: “A world rent by repressions and revolutions badly needed a new paradise myth, and in this island in the back of beyond it found it” (p. 14).
• Ladislao (László) Székely: Tropic Fever: The Adventures of a Planter in Sumatra (1937). The memoirs of a Hungarian who participated in the ‘gold rush’ focused on tobacco cultivation in late-19th-century Dutch East Indies: “He found unimaginable brutality, described it in appalling detail, yet stayed on long enough to acquire the expected reward” (p. 26).
• R. O. Winstedt: Start from Alif: Countfrom One (1969). An official in British Malaya, he is mentioned here on p. 30 for his remarks on the Dutch exploitation of Java.
• Gregor Krause: Bali (2 vols., 1920; archive.org has the 1922 one-volume reprint); “written in German but lavishly illustrated with photographs of Balinese physiques” (p. 31), this book drew the attention of Western travellers and helped make Bali a tourist destination.
• Reginald Johnston: Lion and Dragon in Northern China (1910). A memoir by a British official in China; later he also became the tutor of the last Chinese emperor and eventually served as the last British governor of Weihaiwei (p. 77). I now see on Johnston's Wikipedia page that he wrote two other interesting-sounding memoirs: From Peking to Mandalay (1908) and Buddhist China (1913).
• Stella Benson: this “sylph-like novelist” (p. 82) of the 1920s and '30s lived in China for a number of years, where her husband was a British customs official; Keay mentions her a few times and occasionally quotes from her letters (Some Letters of Stella Benson, ed. by C. Clarabut, 1978), but doesn't mention any of her novels or travel books specifically. I was greatly intrigued to read, in her wikipedia page, that she received the Benson Medal :)
• Osbert Sitwell: Escape With Me! (1939). A travel book, mentioned here on p. 100 for Sitwell's impression of the shallowness of French presence in Indo-China.
• Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown: Crowded Hour (1975). Memoirs of an “old Malay hand” (p. 233; also quoted on pp. 126, 177).
• Maggie Keswick: The Thistle and the Jade (1980). She was the daughter of John Keswick, a prominent Scottish businessman in China (hence the title). Mentioned here on p.  127; when the Sino-Japanese war started in 1937 and the Chinese authorities “banned the use of the radio telegraph, desperate dealers in Jardine Matheson's office suddenly became avid pigeon fanciers” :)
• R. H. Bruce Lockhart: Memoirs of a British Agent (1932). About his time as a spy in Russia in 1918–19; mentioned here on p. 133.
• Mona Gardner: Menacing Sun (1940). An American writer who visited Singapore shortly before the Japanese invasion; quoted here on p. 172.
• Ronald C. H. Mackie [but everyone else on the internet spells it ‘McKie’]: This Was Singapore (1941). “A laconic Australian journalist with a Philip Marlowe prose style” (p. 173), he spent three years in Singapore just before the war.
• Somerset Maugham: The Circle (1921), The Painted Veil (1925), The Casuarina Tree (1926), The Summing Up (1938). According to the wikipedia, these are a play, a novel, a book of short stories, and a memoir, respectively. Keay refers to them here and there in the book, so presumably they are at least partly set in the Far East (pp. 62, 85, 172).
• Agnes Keith: Land Below the Wind (1939), Three Came Home (1948). A “restrained but heart-rending account, later filmed, of survival in Japanese detention” (p. 180), by the American wife of an English official on Borneo.
• K'tut Tantri: Revolt in Paradise (1960). K'tut Tantri was “the Balinese title used by a Scots-born American called Vaneen Walker” (p. 182; but her wikipedia page currently says Muriel Stuart Walker); she ran a hotel on Bali in the 1930s. Her “account of her wartime exploits as a gun-runner for the Indonesian resistance and then as a prisoner of the Japanese has strained the credulity of critical readers” (p. 257). At the end of the war she gained some notoriety for her radio broadcasts in support of the nationalists trying to prevent the re-establishment of colonial rule in Indonesia (ibid.).
• Albert Klestadt: The Sea Was Kind (1959). “A pipe-smoking back-packer with a taste for intelligence”, Klestadt lived in Manila when the Japanese invaded. He was initially interned but “[s]ome fluency in Japanese [. . .], plus his German birth, secured his release” (p. 190), and after many adventures he eventually made his way to Australia.
• F. Spencer Chapman: The Jungle is Neutral (1953). About his involvement in resistance to Japanese occupation in Malaya (p. 213).
• Compton Mackenzie: All Over the Place (1947). A book about “the wartime exploits of the Indian army” (p. 242): “Nowhere east of Gibraltar had Indian troops not been involved” (p. 243).
• James A. Mitchener: The Voice of Asia (1952). Quoted here on p. 236 for his observations on Vyner Brooke, the last White Rajah of Sarawak.
• Dirk Bogarde: Backcloth (1986). A memoir of his time as an intelligence officer in Indonesia just after the war (pp. 249, 252); later he became a famous actor.
• Norman Lewis: A Dragon Apparent (1951). He travelled in Indo-China while the French were trying to re-establish control (p. 274). For a moment I thought he was the same travel writer who had written Old Calabria some time before WW1, but then it turned out that I mixed him up with Norman Douglas.
• S. J. Perelman: Westward Ha! or, Around the World in 80 Clichés (1948). The author was an American humourist; mentioned here on p. 289 for his encounter with the Vietnamese ex-emperor who, by 1947, was living it up in the night clubs of Hong Kong.
• Lucien Bodard: The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam (1967). The author was a journalist and “friend and mentor to the novelist Graham Greene” (p. 292).
• Graham Greene: The Quiet American (1955). A novel set early in the Vietnam War; some of the characters are based on real people (pp. 343–4).

BOOK: "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee"

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Robert van Gulik. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.* (First ed.: privately printed in Tokyo, 1949.) 0486233375. xxiii + 237 pp.

[*Obviously my copy is from a later printing, but it doesn't indicate the year anywhere. I bought it in 2008 and it was new then. The RRP on the back cover is $8.95; as of this writing, in 2024, the price on Dover's website is $17.95. Ouch!]

I cannot claim to be a huge reader in the genre of detective stories, but I have read, and enjoyed, Poe's stories about Dupin and Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes, several times in fact, and I also listened to a lot of audiobooks of Agatha Christie's stories about Poirot; and I was vaguely aware that Poe's Dupin stories, from the first half of the 19th century, were pretty much the beginning of the detective story as a genre. So naturally, I was greatly intrigued when, years ago on a book fair, I came across a book subtitled “An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel”. It turns out that, while Poe's stories may have been the first detective fiction in the West, something very much resembling detective stories and novels had existed in China several centuries earlier than that (p. iii). I bought the book right away, but only got around to reading it now.

As it turns out, the book has very many excellent features — and one or two horrible downsides, but we'll get to these in due course. The translator, Robert van Gulik, was evidently both an excellent Sinologist and a keen connoisseur of crime fiction, both Western and Chinese, and he provided the book with a very interesting introduction and an appendix with some notes; he introduces us to Chinese detective stories, points out a few ways in which they differ from Western ones, and explains the minor adjustments he made in the process of translating the present work to make it more accessible to Western readers. Many of these novels are very long, have a confusingly large cast of characters, reveal the criminals up front, and feature prominent supernatural elements — characteristics which the Chinese audiences expect and like, but which Western ones wouldn't; van Gulik chose to translate the present novel precisely because it is one of the few without these downsides (p. v).

The protagonist of the Chinese detective novel isn't exactly a detective as we would understand the term now, but the “district magistrate”, an imperial official in charge of an area typically consisting of “one fairly large walled city, and all the countryisde around it, say for sixty or seventy miles” (p. ix). When people reported crimes or brought lawsuits before him, it was his job to act as investigator, prosecutor and judge, all in one person; so he has a wider range of things to do than the Western detective, and we get to see him do all these things in the present novel as well. The Chinese readers expected to see the criminals not only discovered, but also tried and executed, the more gruesomely the better.

Judge Dee was a real person, a prominent official at the Imperial Court in the 8th century (p. xiii); but the present novel, written in the 18th century, shows Dee in his early days as a district magistrate. Apparently, although the author didn't go out of his way to avoid anachronisms, there were very few of them anyway since the Chinese law and administration had changed so little in the intervening thousand years (p. xx); moreover, the translator removed one or two more blatant anachronisms, such as the occasional use of firearms (p. 229).

Dee solves three cases in this novel, but they aren't presented as three separate stories; the second case opens up while he's still working on the first, and the third case intervenes later (but is solved quickly). I rather liked this idea, though it made it slightly harder to keep track of what is going on and which character belongs where. There is a pleasing variety in the cast of characters: one case involves travelling silk-merchants, one involves gentry and one mostly involves relatively poor town-dwellers. And moreover, there is also a pleasing variety in the contents of the cases. One isn't a criminal case at all, but turns out to be a combination of a unfortunate accident and of suspicions which prove to be unfounded; one is a fairly straightforward murder case, but the problem is how to find the murderer and prove his guilt; and one is a case that Dee discovers purely by coincidence, and only gradually does it turn out that a crime has been committed at all.

Dee has several assistants whom he occasionally sends out to gather information, watch suspects and so on, but they are mostly just the muscle* while he is the brains of the operation. Sometimes he travels around in the pursuit of his investigations, either in his official capacity as the magistrate or in various disguises; sometimes he conducts hearings and interrogations in his own tribunal. Supernatural elements, which are apparently common in Chinese detective stories, fortunately have a fairly minimal presence here; on one or two occasions, Dee receives hints from ghosts and dreams, but they are mostly very vague hints, some of which he only comes to understand after he has solved the case by conventional means. Apparently it is also common in this genre for the criminal's spirit to find itself in the underworld, judged by a tribunal of infernal demons, but the present novel features a nice inversion of this trope: there is a scene like that, but it turns out to be just Dee and his assistants wearing masks and costumes, trying to trick a suspect into making a confession (and it works).

[*Occasionally we even get ‘action scenes’ in which these characters practice some sort of boxing or martial art. Evidently this art had a rich vocabulary of technical terms for every possible move, and the author loves to deploy them to construct a sort of detailed step-by-step account of the fight: “a tiger clawing at a sheep”, “enticing the tiger out of his forest”, etc. (pp. 104–5). I suppose the original readership of these novels must have relished this sort of thing; I for one was simply glad that in the present novel such scenes are short and few in number.]

So, as far as detective work is concerned, this was all pretty neat and interesting and made for an enjoyable read. But now we come to the downsides. In the Western detective fiction I've read so far — which, as I have already admitted, is fairy limited — the detective isn't really a very powerful figure; he relies on his wits, not on having a position of power over other people. You don't generally see Holmes or Poirot yelling at people, and you certainly don't see them having people flogged and tortured. But for an ancient Chinese district magistrate like Dee, that is a routine part of his work. Unless some higher-ranking imperial official comes for a visit, Dee is the most important person in his district. People who appear in his court are on their knees all the time, knocking their heads against the floor and referring to themselves as ‘this insignificant person’ when talking to him. He can, and does, have them tortured to extract information or confessions from them.

Now, to be sure, you could advance many extenuating circumstances on Dee's behalf. He lived in the 8th century. If you were to set such a story at the same time anywhere west of China — say in the Frankish Empire, in the Byzantine Empire, in the Caliphate — I daresay the tortures would have been just as bad and just as easily forthcoming, possibly more. We even see a scene where Dee is urged to torture a suspect but refuses to do so because there is no evidence against him, only mere suspicions (p. 159). Moreover, Dee is labouring under a supremely idiotic constraint which is not his fault: “it is one of the fundamental principles of the Chinese Penal Code that no one can be sentenced unless he has confesed to the crime” (p. xviii) — of course torture is rife in such a system, otherwise why would anybody ever bother confessing? How could anybody ever have thought that having such a principle in your legal system is a good idea? I suspect that people who came up with it didn't really care about justice in the sense of finding out who was actually guilty, punishing him and avoiding harming the innocent; probably to people who designed this system, it was enough if for each crime, someone — anyone — was found who could be made to confess to it, and who would then get punished for it; a surface appearance of justice was thereby maintained, so that people wouldn't complain too much about crimes not getting investigated and punished, and for this purpose it didn't matter if they got the right person or not.

The translator, in his introduction, tries to point out various factors that, at least in theory, worked to discourage magistrates like Dee from abusing their powers too much (pp. xx–xxiii); and he quotes this opinion of a British official: “As regards then the criminal law of the Chinese, although the allowance of torture in the examination of prisoners is a blot which cannot be overlooked, although the punishment for treason and parricide is monstrous, and the punishment of the wooden collar or portable pillory is not to be defended, yet the Code—when its procedure is understood—is infinitely more exact and satisfactory than our own system, and very far from being the barbarous cruel abomination it is generally supposed to be”.

Well, I don't know. To my mind all this sounds a little bit too much like ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?’ Sure, if you disregard the torture and the inhumane punishments and the vast potential for abuse in the hands of corrupt officials — if you disregard all that, it was probably a fine system. But all that was actually a routine part of the system, so... it *was* a barbarous cruel abomination. The most that can be said for it is that Western systems were also barbarous cruel abominations until a comparatively recent time.

As far as I'm concerned, this aspect of the novel prevented me from enjoying it. I can be intrigued by a detective as he uses his wit and logical skill to solve a puzzling case; I might even admire him if, at the end, he gathers everyone into a room and explains how he did it. But for the judge, who acts as if he were better than other people, who demands deference from them, who presumes to pass judgment on them — for him I can have nothing but the liveliest contempt. They have a very easy job with all these powers vested in them. If they wanted me to respect them, they'd have to lay down all their powers *and then try to accomplish anything* — that would impress me, to do something when you have no power over people; but the way it is now, they should only be despised.

The fact that the criminals in this novel suffer tortures and execution also caused me to transfer all my sympathy to them and away from the victims. Sure, the fact that Shao killed one of his fellow silk-merchants and also a random passer-by who might otherwise have become a witness isn't exactly commendable; but the very essence of a merchant's work is to screw people out of their money; from that to murdering them for their bales of silk is but a small step; we allow them to do the former, so why not also the latter?

And sure, the fact that Mrs. Djou killed her husband in the hopes of subsequently marrying her lover isn't exactly commendable either — and yet I can't really find it in me to object to it all that much. He's long dead and buried, so what good can punishing her now possibly accomplish? Besides, it's not her fault that divorce isn't easily available in ancient China. The same applies a fortiori to Hsu, her lover, who doesn't seem to have been guilty of anything more than adultery.

It would be easier to sympathize with the victims if we had got to know them first; but in this novel we never get to know them as individuals, we only hear about them once they are already dead, and so it is easy to write them off without feeling sorry for them. I lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of the author; there are eight billion people in the world, and I cannot care very much if a random stranger gets murdered; Mrs. Djou is a human being whose sufferings and death I have many reasons to care about, but her late husband and victim, Bee Hsun, is just a name to us, and we have no reason to care if he lives or dies.

So to me, this novel felt like a tasty dish sprinkled with broken glass. Theoretically, there's still a tasty dish in there somewhere, but practically it's ruined beyond repair. Perhaps other readers, if they are able to ignore Dee's judicial violence better than me, will enjoy the book better than I did. In any case, this doesn't change my admiration for the translator, who did an excellent job of making the book as accessible as possible even to a reader like me, who knows next to nothing about China, its administration, its legal system and the like.

ToRead:

• Robert van Gulik, the translator of the present volume, went on to write a series of some sixteen volumes of ‘Chinese detective stories’ of his own, with Judge Dee as the protagonist. I don't know if they manage to avoid torture and execution scenes or not; but if they do, they sound like they should make for quite enjoyable reading.