The Cases of Judge Li: A Chinese Detective Classic of the Late Qing (English Translation) (Judges of Dynasties: Imperial China's Legendary Court Cases) - Softcover

Jushi, Xihong

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798170948499

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

A magistrate who would rather ride out in disguise than sit behind a desk.
A province full of people who would rather he stayed there.

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
hundred paces, and the most restless investigator in late Qing fiction.

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
them. So he goes out himself.

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
folded garment under a dead man's pillow.

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
unsolved.

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
abridged.

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
- A late flowering of the gong'an, the Chinese courtroom mystery

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
Mystery

"He does not wait for the truth to be brought to him. He goes out and finds it."

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798170948499
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 212