THE CHINESE GOLD MURDERS takes us back to the beginning of Judge Dee's career when, thirty-three years of age, he had been appointed to his first post in the provinces, viz. that of magistrate of Peng-lai, a port city on the northeast coast of Shantung Province.
Then the Tang Emperor Kao-tsung (64ß-683) had just succeeded in establishing Chinese suzerainty over the greater part of Korea. According to the chronology of judge Dee Mysteries, Judge Dee arrived in Peng-lai in the summer of A.D. 663. [1] During the successful Chinese Korea campaign in the autumn of the preceding year, when they defeated the combined Korean-Japanese forces, the girl Yü-soo had been carried away as a war slave. Chiao Tai had taken part in the previous campaign of 661 as a captain over hundred.
The reader will find a pictorial map of Peng-lai in the front of the book, and in the Postscript information on the ancient Chinese judicial system, taken over, with a few changes, from the preceding volume of the series, together with an account of the Chinese sources utilized.
ROBERT VAN GULIK
<a l:href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> In the year 665 Judge Dee was transferred from Peng-lai to Hanyuan, and thence in 658 to Poo-yang in Kiangsu Province. In 670 he was appointed to the magistracy of Lan-fang, on the western frontier, where he stayed five vears. In 676 he was transferred to Pei-chow in the far north, where he solved his last three cases as district magistrate. In the same year he was appointed President of the Metropolitan Court of justice, in the Imperial Capital.