True Crime & Mystery

In the winter of 1873 a bridal chair carried a seventeen year old girl to a wedding in Shanghai. The marriage had her mother’s consent, matchmakers, a written contract and a betrothal payment. Then the clan complained, the runners arrived, and the whole thing was judged to be a kidnapping.

A monk on the road was refused a bed, saw thieves go over a wall in the night, and ran. He fell into a dry well with the murdered woman already at the bottom, confessed under beating, and was three days from execution when the prefect noticed that the stolen goods and the knife had never been found.

In 1557 a man was speared six times beside his family fish pond in Zhejiang. Three county magistrates called it murder and prescribed strangulation. The new magistrate in Chun’an re-examined the body, found pond mud in the dead man’s ears, and took the rope back off his neck.

In February 1998 a Kunming court sentenced Sun Xiaoguo to death. He was released from prison in April 2010 and spent the next eight years as a shareholder and bar owner in the city nightlife, until a single kick in a karaoke room put his name in front of a court clerk who asked how a dead man was still walking around.

In July 2015 a Peking University student killed his mother in their Fuzhou apartment. For the next six months he answered her phone, wrote her messages and resigned from her job in her handwriting, while taking 1.44 million yuan from relatives who believed she had gone abroad with him.

In May 1923 a band of armed farmers unbolted a few steel plates from the Jinan-Pukou railway, stopped the night express, and took thirty-nine foreign passengers and about thirty Chinese ones up a mountain. Everyone knew who had done it. The problem was what anyone could do about it.

A farmer came to the county office to report that his ox had been mutilated. Instead of sending men to look for the culprit, the magistrate told him to kill the animal and sell the meat, which was itself a crime. The man he was waiting for walked in the door a few days later.

Princess Taiping lost two boxes of treasure from a locked storehouse, and the empress gave the city three days to find them or else. The man who solved it waited a month and a half without doing anything at all, and then watched a funeral procession for mourners who were not mourning.

Two small children fell from a fifteenth floor window in Chongqing in November 2020 and everyone called it an accident, including the father who wept on the pavement below. What turned it into a murder case was half a year of chat messages that the two defendants had deleted.

In October 2011 two Chinese cargo boats were seized on the Mekong and thirteen crewmen were killed. Finding the man behind it took more than half a year, three failed raids, and a handover negotiated with three governments at once.