It was a reaction quite unexpected of the aged abbot, who usually carried himself with an undisturbed composure, but Judge Dee thought he could guess why. It was because of his mentioning the song ‘Ode to a Goose’ and the half-sitting, half-reclining old invalid on the rattan recliner. It confirmed his suspicion that the abbot definitely knew something about Luo staying in the vicinity.

  ‘You must have walked too far, Your Honor,’ Abbot Vanity said in a still slightly tremulous voice. ‘In fact, I don’t think I can remember having ever seen such a stream shaded by bamboo groves. I have lived all these years here, you know.’

  Apparently, the abbot was trying to pull himself together, ready for another round of shadow boxing, but Judge Dee did not see any point in playing along with the old monk. He thought he had already received his confirmation in the abbot’s fluster.

  Judge Dee just wanted to give the abbot another push, like hand-pushing in tai chi.

  ‘It happened to me like a hallucination, Abbot Vanity. For a fleeting moment, I even thought I knew the old man lying still on the rattan recliner.’

  ‘Appearance or hallucination indeed, Your Honor. Buddha show mercy on us! Everything is possible, but not pardonable.’

  That sounded like another confirmation by the abbot regarding the identity of the old man on the rattan recliner.

  ‘Yes, everything is possible, but what we do is not necessarily pardonable in the history behind us. You have put it so masterfully, Abbot Vanity.’

  Luckily or unluckily, other monks also hurried over and raised objections against Judge Dee’s plans for an imminent departure even though he was sick.

  ‘I’m so sorry about this,’ Judge Dee said in earnest. ‘I received an urgent message from Her Majesty last night. So I have no choice but to hurry back to the capital of Chang’an. I really appreciate, from the bottom of my heart, all the things you have been doing for me in the Dingguo Temple. They have been the kindest deeds that have happened to me. Indeed, you have all been taking such marvelous care of me.’

  Some of the senior monks were well aware of Judge Dee’s potential involvement in fierce politics at the highest level in the Forbidden City. They only made a half-hearted attempt, therefore, to push the judge to stay a couple of days longer in the temple.

  Consequently, without further ado, specially prepared snacks and freshly squeezed juice were being moved from the temple kitchen into the carriage in a hurry.

  Monk Disillusion bustled around, adding this or that snack enthusiastically, and even Abbot Vanity helped with preparations.

  Yang stood aside, whistling, without making any comments. No decision made on the part of his master would have been too surprising to him, though Yang thought he had heard nothing of an urgent message from the empress the previous night. He had only observed that Judge Dee’s room was lit late, and he’d observed a silhouette against the time-yellowed paper window, still writing long after midnight.

  Yang knew better than to raise any questions at the moment.

  Nodding, Yang then mounted the carriage horse in the front of the temple and cracked his whip.

  The carriage horse neighed abruptly, and Yang looked ahead of him. The road, covered with melting frost, stretched into the distance, where verdant peaks joined the still-gray horizon.

  The carriage started rolling down the hill. Sitting inside, Judge Dee made no comment, either.

  As it seemed to him, there was no point trying to explain to Yang what had happened the previous day and night. In fact, Judge Dee hadn’t reached his ‘conclusion’ until well past midnight – or, rather, the conclusion as expounded in the report on the investigation to Empress Wu. Knowledge about all the political conspiracies going on behind the investigation would do Yang no good. Nor could Judge Dee have explained all this simply in a couple of sentences.

  Besides, Judge Dee himself remained bewildered, in some ways, about all the conspiracies going on in the investigation.

  In his mind’s eye, the dream scene of his talking and arguing with Luo Binwang in the sampan on the Shu River suddenly became juxtaposed with the subsequent dream-like scene he had witnessed across the stream the previous day. It appeared as if there were no longer any clear-cut lines for Judge Dee to divide fantasy, hallucination, reality and logic.

  The world, with its ever-changing appearances, seemed to be revolving faster and faster, crazier and crazier. Judge Dee merely wanted to sit tight in the rolling, rumbling carriage, with all the thoughts banished from his overburdened mind, banished from the world of red dust.

  But his attempt at peaceful mediation failed. It failed to work for him right now. According to a popular Buddhist saying, appearance comes out of the heart in confusion. And his heart had still been shaking in confusion with the violent turmoil of the last few days.

  He’d have to find a different way to calm down, Judge Dee contemplated, stroking his gray beard.

  ‘The way can be named, but not in the ordinary way,’ he said inaudibly to himself, repeating the well-known quote from the Daodejing, though it sounded like a cryptic truism.

  Earlier in the investigation, Judge Dee had also restudied a Daoist maxim in that famous classic by Laozi. ‘Doing nothing is doing everything.’ In Judge Dee’s understanding, ‘doing nothing’ could mean, among other things, that a man should not go out of his way to do something with a fixed purpose, but he was not too sure about his understanding of the Daoist maxim.

  Could the purpose of things, like the appearance of things, have also kept on changing: this moment, like a white cloud, and the next moment, like a black dog?

  The original purpose at the beginning of the Luo Binwang investigation had proved – for Judge Dee himself at least – to be utterly different at the conclusion of the investigation.

  During their lunch break on the third day of their trip back to the city of Chang’an, Judge Dee and Yang chose to sit in a shady spot overlooking a small lake, sipping at freshly squeezed fruit juice and munching steamed buns stuffed with vegetarian delicacies. All of these had come out of a rattan snack basket specially prepared by the monks in the temple kitchen.

  An oriole could be heard twittering nearby, though it remained hidden somewhere in the small wood. Judge Dee let his glance sweep over the lake and rest on a line of mounds of fresh soil, which had been hurriedly heaped up on the other side of the lake.

  In front of the mounds stood several newly painted white wooden tablets stuck in the hard soil. Somehow, they looked like makeshift tombstones erected there for the deceased. Young weeds were sprouting on the new graves, while bubbles produced by wriggling creatures burst in the lake’s green water.

  Tombstones for Ning, Hua, Little Swallow, plus two nameless burnt bodies in the Dingguo Temple – had Judge Dee ruled out the possibility of one of them being Luo Binwang?

  He could simply be hallucinating again as he looked across the expanse of water, Judge Dee knew. In accordance with the Diamond Sutra, there is nothing but appearance that fills the immense void of nothingness between heaven and earth.

  In the end, Judge Dee told himself again, he’d finally come to know that he knew nothing.

  A whiff of breeze ruffled the sweeping willows across the lake. He jumped up, startled at the sight of a white goose emerging out of nowhere, gliding over the deep green water in leisure. With its red webbed feet pedaling non-stop in the clear ripples, it looked as if it would reach the other side of the lake soon, bidding its farewell to Judge Dee.

  Judge Dee shook his head violently. It could have been just another elusive appearance. Of late, he had frequently found himself transported away in fitful trances. He was getting old – too old and helpless to serve as a competent judge.

  But he found himself seized, at the same moment, by an inexplicable impulse to put down several lines of poetry. His own lines. It was almost an absurd impulse, he knew.

  Was it because Judge Dee had been mixing lately with a number of poets, or with their poems, like those poems composed by Luo Binwang, Jiong Yang, Wang Bo and Lu Zhaoling? Even a couple of them by Empress Wu, in addition to all the poets at the farewell party in the capital in the very beginning of the investigation of the Luo Binwang case.

  Also, poetry lovers like Dr Hua, Little Swallow, Abbot Vanity … The list could go on.

  So the poem Judge Dee was composing, paradoxical as it might seem to be, could actually serve as a sort of catharsis for himself, at the ‘conclusion’ of his investigation of the Luo Binwang case.

  With the lines pedaling across the surface of his mind, singing, Judge Dee picked up a broken twig, with a surreal sensation of déjà vu, and put the lines down on a small patch of sand by the lake.

  It was a patch of sand he had not seen before.

  Farewell to a Goose

  Across the Han Dynasty bridge,

  under the Tang Dynasty sun

  we are going to part, like

  the plum blossom unfolding out

  in a white paper fan, like

  the distant horizon sinking

  on a black crow’s wing,

  as the weeds start swinging,

  unexpectedly, to an unfamiliar tune.

  Bubble of wrigglers

  bursting on the green water.

  It was not a poem characteristic of Judge Dee’s style. It was both a farewell to the goose and to the people he had encountered in the course of the investigation – some of them already dead, with weeds already sprouting on the new mounds of their graves.

  How had the lines come rushing into his mind, all of a sudden? Lines somberly melancholic and sentimental, yet nonetheless full of intensity under the light of the present moment, which is already fleeing into the past moment.

  Judge Dee heaved another disconsolate sigh, feeling as if the poem had been composing him, from beginning to the bitter end.

  POSTSCRIPT

  In my first Judge Dee book, The Shadow of the Empire, I acknowledged my indebtedness to Robert van Gulik’s Poets and Murder. I also touched on Gulik’s failure to resist the temptation of pulling together Judge Dee (Di Renjie, 630–700), the most famous investigating judge in the Tang Empire, and the celebrated courtesan poetess Yu Xuanji (844–871), into the most sensational murder case in the Tang dynasty. Gulik did that at the expense of anachronism. He was such a profoundly learned, encyclopedic Sinologist, that it was out of the question that he’d simply overlooked the 200-year time difference between the two main characters.

  As an ardent admirer of Gulik, I too failed to resist the temptation of presenting Yu Xuanji and Judge Dee together in The Shadow of the Empire, a novel inspired by Gulik’s Poets and Murder, though my Judge Dee investigation has a totally different storyline. For a far-stretched self-justification, should I have the nerve to call it a stroke of poetic or fictional justice?

  In Tang history, however, there was a real case concerning Luo Binwang (626–687?), Wu Zetian (624–705), and Judge Dee (Di Renji 630–700). The Luo Binwang case was far more crucial and influential in the subsequent political development of Tang dynasty history. It was also full of complicated, intriguing conspiracies in the cut-throat power struggle at the very top of the Tang Empire. For reasons beyond me, Gulik chose not to pick that case up for an installment in his celebrated Judge Dee series.

  So, all this conveniently comes into my second installment of the Judge Dee investigation, The Conspiracies of the Empire. And fortunately, the present book succeeds in avoiding the anachronisms of the previous book.

  It is necessary for us, I believe, to take a quick look into the historical background of the three main characters: of their paths crossing one another at a given historic moment, and of their complicated relationships.

  Wu Zetian was born in 624 in Lizhou. She grew up in a middle-class family with a decent education. When she was fourteen, she was selected to enter the imperial palace as a ‘palace lady’, to serve the first Emperor Taizong of the Tang Empire. It was said that Wu was summoned to Emperor Tuazon’s bedchamber time and time again until his death in 649.

  Following the conventions of the time, she was then sent to a convent, to live in seclusion as a nun for the rest of her life. She soon started a scandalous affair there, however, with the new Tang dynasty emperor, Emperor Gaozong, and she lost no time finding her way back into the palace.

  In her attempt to monopolize his affection, she clashed with Empress Wang, resulting in a series of rumored conspiracies. The most significant of these was that when her infant daughter died in the crib, she convinced Emperor Gaozong that Empress Wang was responsible for the death of the baby. Emperor Gaozong therefore deprived Wang of the title of empress and promoted Wu to the empress position instead. Emperor Gaozong officially announced Wu as the empress in 655.

  So, Empress Wu turned into the most powerful and influential woman at court, with the Tang Empire reaching the peak of its glory. More decisive and proactive than her husband, she presided over the court together with the emperor, coming into total control of the throne after Emperor Gaozong’s death in 665.

  It was difficult for a woman to maintain power in ancient, Confucianism-dominated China, but she proved to be a capable and competent ruler. She made intelligent decisions that brought the Tang Empire to levels of unprecedented prosperity. During her reign, Empress Wu expanded the borders of the empire by conquering new lands. She also helped to improve the lives of the peasants by lowering taxes, building new public works and improving farming techniques.

  On the other hand, Empress Wu managed to achieve all this by employing the empire secret police – with an iron fist – in omnipresent surveillance over the Tang officials and people.

  There was another reason she was capable of keeping power in her hands for so long. It was because she succeeded in gathering under herself a group of competent and talented people, whom she promoted to top positions in court in accordance with nothing but their abilities. Among these talented people, Judge Dee cut a most prominent figure.

  Judge Dee (Di Renjie), the protagonist of The Conspiracies of the Empire, was born in 630 in a bureaucratic landlord family. He studied hard at a young age and passed the civil service examination early, with flying colors. He had a long official career, and because of his competence and integrity, he got one promotion after another in his official career.

  Judge Dee was not a judge, however, in the present-day sense of the word. Simply, there was no separation of executive and judicial powers in the Tang Empire. (For that matter, there is still no separation of the powers in today’s China. The interests of the Chinese Communist Party are always placed high above the law. The current Chinese ‘emperor’ has had China’s constitution changed into one with no term limit, to allow him to rule forever just like an emperor.) As a matter of fact, Judge Dee was a high-ranking minister during Empress Wu’s reign, working in a number of senior official positions, and serving as her premier official more than once. ‘Judge Dee’ was a neutral title, which sounded acceptable to those involved in the cut-throat power struggles at the very top of the Tang Empire – and proved as acceptable to Judge Dee himself, too, what with Empress Wu’s reliance on him, and with the high expectations the other Confucianists-turned-officials had of him.

  It was said that one day, Judge Dee needed to report to Empress Wu about something urgent concerning the welfare of the Tang Empire. Rather than making him wait, she rushed out of her bedroom, her feet bare, her hair disheveled, to discuss the issue with him for hours. It was commonly believed that the empress did so to purposely imitate the first Han dynasty emperor, who was known for his successful reign, particularly regarding his sincere respect for his talented, wise officials.

  While beholden to the empress for her appreciation of him, Judge Dee himself was also a Confucianist-turned-official. That spelled a deep contradiction in him. From an orthodox Confucianist stance, he was supposed to support the Li family staying in line on the throne, but at the same time, he was also supposed to support Empress Wu, who had an ambition to found an empire of her own, with the Wu family members as the successors to the new empire.

  Judge Dee found himself in a dilemma, but he was not afraid to speak his mind. He told Empress Wu that it was necessary to keep the Lis in line for the succession of the Tang Empire. He based his shrewd argument on a Confucian convention – that is, only the sons or grandsons are legitimate to present the ancestral offerings to the deceased at the tomb-sweeping holiday, but not the nephews or nieces. It was an argument not well received by Empress Wu. She demoted Judge Dee to a lower position, but after only a short while, she called him back to several senior positions at the court, where he continued to serve directly under her.

  The poet Luo Binwang was born in 626 in Yiwu County (nowadays Yiwu in Zhejiang Province.) At eight years old, he had already become known for his poem ‘Ode to a Goose’, so expectations for his career and prospects were high.

  Luo’s entanglement with Empress Wu could be described, paradoxically, as a matter of misplaced Yin and Yang. For an eight-year-old prodigy credited with ‘The Ode to a Goose’, Luo succeeded in the high-level civil service examination fairly late in life. As a brilliant, proud poet, he could not have helped complain about the unfairness of the civil service examination system under Empress Wu. What’s more, after he had finally passed the civil service examination and become a low-ranking official at the court, he was soon thrown into prison for something he did that displeased Empress Wu. He was promptly released, but he must have known that his official career was pretty much doomed.

  Then, as luck would have it, an unsuccessful rebellion led by General Xu Jingye in the early Tang Empire put the three of them – Judge Dee, Empress Wu and Luo Binwang – in a deeper, more intricate entanglement with one another.

  So a few words about the rebellion launched by Xu Jingye is also needed here. Xu Jingye (died 684) was a Tang military general and politician, and a grandson of a famous Tang Dynasty general Li Shiji. After Emperor Gaozong’s death in 683, he was succeeded by his son Li Xian, known as Emperor Zhongzong, but the actual power remained tightly grasped in the hands of Empress Wu – now the Empress Dowager. In spring 684, after the new emperor showed some signs of independence, she deposed him and reduced him to the title of Prince of Luling, replacing him with his brother Li Dan, the Prince of Yu, as Emperor Ruizong.