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In the winter of 208 AD, Cao Cao lashed his captured fleet together so his northern soldiers could keep their footing. It worked. It also turned a navy into a single target. Ten fire ships, one southeast wind, and the battle that split the Yangtze between three powers for the next seventy years.

In the first month of 692 the chancellor Di Renjie, the man the English-speaking world knows as Judge Dee, was dragged into a prison cell and accused of treason. He confessed on the spot. Then he wrote his defence on a strip of silk, sewed it into his padded coat, and had the coat sent home to be made lighter for the warmer weather.

On 22 August 1870 the governor-general of Liangjiang was stabbed to death in the street outside his own office in Nanjing. The assassin was caught on the spot and gave three different motives over eight months of interrogation. The official finding was that nobody sent him. One hundred and fifty years later, that finding is still the problem.

In 1873 a low-ranking examiner in Zhejiang pushed a silver needle into a dead man and drew it out black. He had not washed it the way the manual required. Three years, two imperial commissioners and one public autopsy later, the case became the first great scandal of the late Qing, and one of the earliest Chinese murder cases followed day by day in a newspaper.

In March 1992 a twenty-two-year-old medical student was killed in a teaching building in Nanjing, and the only thing the killer left behind was a description given by two campus guards. The case stayed open for twenty-eight years. It was closed by a man who never appeared on any suspect list, and by a stretch of DNA he had inherited from his father.

On 6 July 2020 a man in Hangzhou walked into a police station and reported that his wife had vanished. For the next ten days he was on television, weeping and offering a reward. Nineteen days after she disappeared, the police found her in the septic tank beneath the building. This is the case of Xu Guoli and Lai Huili, and of the two tons of water nobody could explain.

A failed examination candidate walking home in the rain meets a woman herding sheep beside the road. She is not a shepherdess, and the sheep are not sheep, and the letter she gives him is addressed to the bottom of a lake.

A young man walking a night road is joined by a stranger who does not breathe. Asked who he is, the stranger says he is a ghost. Asked the same question back, the young man lies. What follows is the oldest joke in the Chinese supernatural record, and it is told on the ghost.

A young scholar falls ill over a girl he saw once at the Lantern Festival. He finds her in the hills, in a household where nobody can stop laughing. What she is takes half the story to come out, and when it does, she asks him for one thing.

A scholar spends the night in a ruined temple and refuses both a beautiful woman and a bar of gold. The next day two men die in the east wing with tiny holes in their feet. Then the woman comes back and tells him what the gold really was.