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For ten years Zhang Juzheng ran the Ming empire for a boy emperor, auditing every office with three ledgers and rebuilding the tax on a single payment in silver. When he died in 1582 the granaries held ten years of grain. Two years later soldiers sealed his house and let the family starve inside.

In 383 the ruler of Former Qin marched south with an army his own proclamations called a million. On the far side of the Feishui stood eighty thousand men of the Jin. One order to fall back, one shout from a captured officer standing in the rear, and the largest army in China came apart on the bank of a shallow river.

In 206 BC, with the Qin empire broken and forty thousand men camped behind the hills, Xiang Yu invited his rival to dinner. Through one long meal a sword dancer kept aiming at the guest, a bodyguard pushed past two halberds with a shield, and the host said almost nothing. This is what the historian Sima Qian recorded, down to where every man sat.

A courtesan elected Prime Minister of the Flower Kingdom went out for a drive in Shanghai in June 1920 and never came back. Six days later her body was found in a wheat field. The case was broken by the one thing nobody thought to hide, the licence plate on the borrowed car.

In 1727 a complainant in Guangdong bound himself to the penalty for false accusation and reported that his young cousin had been poisoned. The next morning the grave was opened and the grave was empty. The man who had stolen the body was the man who had come to court to report the death.

In 1247 a Southern Song judicial commissioner named Song Ci finished the earliest surviving systematic manual of forensic medicine in the world. In it he recorded a case solved by laying every sickle in a village out in the summer sun and watching which blade drew the flies, and a method for seeing wounds on bare bone through the red light of an oiled paper umbrella.

A school official who supervised the building of a running track disappeared in 2003. He had been killed and buried under the track itself, and for sixteen years the children of the county ran over him every morning. Ten officials knew, and for sixteen years nothing moved.

For fourteen years a killer worked in one Chinese city, leaving prints and traces at every scene and never being caught. The case broke not on a fingerprint at all. It broke on a blood sample taken, for an unrelated reason, from a man who was a distant relative of the killer and did not know it.

For nine years a mountain village sent a girl of twelve into the serpent cave on the first day of the eighth month. The tenth girl walked in on her own feet, carrying a sword and leading a dog.

Chiyou could summon the wind and the rain. The Yellow Emperor lost nine battles in a row. What he brought in to finish the war won him the world and cost two beings from heaven their way home, and the ground where they fought did not see rain for a long time.