In the heat of high summer, beside a road, a man had been killed with a sickle: more than a dozen cuts across the body, and nothing missing from his clothes.
Robbery was ruled out at once. A thief does not leave the money and cut a man a dozen times.
The investigating official asked the dead man’s wife whom her husband had quarrelled with. She said he had no enemies, but that a few days earlier a man had come to borrow money, had been refused, and had fixed a date for repayment before he left.
A notice went up ordering every household nearby to hand in its sickles. Anyone who hid one would be taken as the killer.
Seventy or eighty sickles came in and were laid out in a row in the yard. It was the hottest part of the year. After a while the flies came, and settled on one blade.
The official asked whose it was. The man who had come to borrow money stood up.
One. Recorded in a manual, not a novel
That case is not fiction, and it is not a folk tale told about a clever magistrate. It is written into the Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified, compiled by an official of the Southern Song named Song Ci and completed in 1247. The case appears in a section of the book devoted to hard and doubtful matters.
The book runs to five volumes and fifty-three sections. It covers how to conduct an examination at a scene, and how to read the signs left on a body. It explains how to tell a wound inflicted before death from one inflicted after it, and how to distinguish one cause of death from another. It sets out how to recognise poisoning, and closes with more than a dozen first-aid methods for poisoning and for injury.
It is the earliest surviving systematic manual of forensic medicine in the world. It predates the first comparable European work, De Relationibus Medicorum by the Italian physician Fortunato Fidelis, by more than three hundred years.
For English-speaking readers there is a familiar way in, and it needs a warning attached. The Chinese investigating magistrate is a stock figure in the West, mostly because of Judge Dee, the character the Dutch diplomat Robert van Gulik turned into a long series of detective novels after finding a forgotten Qing novel while posted to wartime Chongqing. Van Gulik drew on fiction. Song Ci was the reality underneath the fiction, and his manual is the document that shows what Chinese criminal investigation actually looked like. It is less tidy than a locked room, and more useful.
The book could only have come out of the Song. More of that dynasty’s emperors understood the law and respected it than was true of any other period in Chinese history. After the catastrophe of 1127 the Southern Song court knew what a wrongful conviction cost, and repeatedly ordered that any doubtful case be sent upward for review. The examination system kept a separate track for men who had committed the criminal code to memory, and statesmen known for their prose, Fan Zhongyan and Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi among them, were also well read in the statutes. A whole literature of case analysis grew up alongside the law. Song Ci had soil to grow in.
And the case of the sickles is the best way in, because it shows what the book is actually made of. Not magic, and not confession. Method.
Read as a document of Chinese true crime rather than as a curiosity, what the book records is never a brilliant guess. It is a set of repeatable procedures, together with a careful account of what those procedures could prove and what they could not.
Two. Why the flies landed there
Start with the cleverest step, and be precise about why it worked.
The weapon had been washed. The killer cleaned the blood off the blade, put the sickle away at home, and believed the trace was gone.
What he could not clean off was the smell. Blood leaves something on iron that a human nose cannot detect and a fly can. So Song Ci had every sickle in the village brought out and laid in the sun together, in the same light and the same heat, so that a comparison could be made. Whichever blade had drawn blood would be identified for him.
It is worth naming what happened in that yard, because it is a real technique and not a trick. Song Ci had turned a problem with no visible evidence into a controlled comparison. Modern forensic entomology does the same thing: it reads insects for what they can tell the court about a death. Chinese writers on the subject treat this case as among the earliest recorded applications anywhere.
In the book there is a fuller and even more exacting passage on how to tell a true hanging from the body of a man who was strangled first and hung up afterwards. Song Ci set the two sets of signs side by side. In a real hanging, he wrote, the mark of the rope runs diagonally up toward the ears, and is a deep purple; the face is peaceful, the eyes closed, the mouth open and the teeth showing; there is thick saliva hanging at the chest, and the bowels have emptied behind. In a body strangled and then suspended, the eyes are usually open and the hair disordered; because the circulation has already stopped, the rope mark is shallow and faint; and the tongue does not come out.
Forensic examiners still consult those distinctions.
Three. One red umbrella
The most famous thing in the book, though, is a piece of equipment.
The instruction is plain, and short. When examining bones for injury, if the traces cannot be seen, soak the bones in wine lees and vinegar and cover them for a time. Then carry them into the open and hold above them a new oiled silk cloth, or an oiled paper umbrella, so that the sunlight passes through it onto the bone. The injury will appear. On a rainy or overcast day, use hot charcoal held at a distance instead.
Why should an umbrella make a wound visible?
In modern terms, a red oiled umbrella acts as a filter. It gives the examination a narrow band of light, close to what a laboratory would call a monochromatic source. Bone that has been injured has a different structure, and under light of a particular wavelength it absorbs and reflects differently from sound bone. The injury stands out. The principle is the same one behind the ultraviolet lamps that forensic pathologists use on bone today. The vinegar and the wine, meanwhile, do something close to what modern bone examination achieves with a decalcifying solution.
There was no microscope in the thirteenth century and no spectrometer. Song Ci arrived at the same result with observation and improvisation.
He also drew the finer distinctions. An injury inflicted before death shows a clear red colour, with blood staining on the membrane over the bone. An injury inflicted after death does not redden, because there is no blood left to soak into the bone. Between old and new injuries, one reads the depth of the colour and the presence of new bone growth.
The book records another method besides, called the plum cake test. Where the surface of a body shows nothing but a fatal injury is suspected, mash white plums and spread the paste over the area to be examined. Bruises that could not be seen before will surface.
There is one more passage in the book that reads today like common sense, and that had to be written down carefully eight hundred years ago. In a pit where fire had burned, Song Ci observed, a foul vapour collects and a man inside is overcome without noticing, and dies with a body that is soft and shows no injury. That is carbon monoxide poisoning, described before the gas had a name.
Four. The man who wrote it
Song Ci, whose courtesy name was Huifu, was born in 1186 in Jianyang, in Fujian. His father rose to be a judicial officer in Guangzhou, where the work was criminal cases. In his youth Song Ci was a neighbour of the philosopher Zhu Xi, and he was trained in the same school of thought: go and look, go and check, go and verify.
He passed the highest examinations in 1217, and over the next twenty years served in a series of posts across the country, as a county military officer and as an assistant prefect, among others. From 1232 onward he held the office of judicial commissioner, and in that role he travelled through four circuits: Guangdong, Jiangxi, Guangxi and Hunan.
The most concrete record of him comes from Guangdong.
In 1239 Song Ci was appointed judicial commissioner of Guangdong. He arrived to find the province’s prison administration broken. His subordinates mostly did not enforce the law, and men had been sitting in cells for years with their cases never heard. A person could lose several years of his life in detention without ever being convicted of anything.
What he did was blunt. He issued regulations, set deadlines, and went into the files and the scenes himself. His friend Liu Kezhuang, a poet of the Southern Song, wrote his epitaph, and in it he recorded a figure: in eight months Song Ci cleared more than two hundred capital cases.
Liu Kezhuang described him in terms worth repeating. He heard cases clearly, and decided them firmly. He was generous to the good and severe with the powerful. People in the far villages of his jurisdiction, Liu wrote, felt as though Song Ci were standing in front of them.
One thing should be said plainly. The official history of the Song dynasty contains no biography of Song Ci. What we know of his life rests mainly on that epitaph and on his own book. Only in the late Qing, when the scholar Lu Xinyuan compiled a supplementary history, was Song Ci added to the roll of upright officials.
A man who went unrecorded in his own dynasty’s history wrote a book that has lasted eight hundred years.
Five. Why he had to write it
Song Ci completed the book in 1247, at the age of sixty-one.
What drove him to write it was an error rate he kept seeing in the files.
In his time the body was not examined by a physician. It was examined by a coroner, a post of very low status, often filled by men who also handled funerals and burials. Their descendants were barred from the imperial examinations. By the Qing dynasty the coroner had been formally brought into the county yamen as a clerk, but the establishment was tiny and the pay was miserable; the records describe the post as held in contempt, with wages that were barely enough to live on.
The coroner worked to a fixed procedure. He called out his findings point by point against an official checklist of the body. Where there was no injury he reported that the body was whole. Where there was injury he had to measure its length and depth and call out the numbers, and he had to say explicitly whether a wound was fatal or not fatal, and he could not simply report that a wound existed. Each kind of injury had a proper name, and calling it by the wrong one was itself an offence.
The procedure was meticulous. But the person applying it was a person, and people misread things, and the price of a misreading was a life.
Song Ci was a scholar by training and knew nothing of medicine when he began. To fill that gap he taught himself from medical texts and put what he learned of physiology, pathology, pharmacology and toxicology to work in examining the injured and the dead. He had one standard, and it was thoroughness. Not even the most private parts of a body were to be passed over, which in his time required some nerve.
In his preface Song Ci compressed the whole argument into three escalating sentences. Among criminal matters, nothing weighs more than a capital case. In a capital case, nothing matters more than the first account of what happened. And in establishing that first account, nothing matters more than the examination.
He was turning the examination from a formality into a discipline that had to account for itself.
The cost of error is not theoretical, and the Chinese record supplies a later illustration. In the famous late Qing case of Yang Naiwu and the girl known as Little Cabbage, the whole miscarriage of justice began in a single examination. Blood from the dead man’s nose and mouth had run into his eyes and ears, and the coroner read it as bleeding from all seven openings of the head. The dark grey of the nails was read as the blue-black of poisoning. A silver needle taken from the body was not wiped with the soap-pod solution the rules required, and the residue left on the metal was read as proof of poison. A few misread details on one corpse overturned the lives of several families.
Six. The road the book took
After it was finished, the book was issued throughout the empire. In the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties that followed, one forensic work after another was built on top of it, and generation after generation of local governments treated it as the standard guide to examining a body. For six centuries it was the reference that decided, in a Chinese criminal case, whether a defendant lived or died.
It also travelled out of China.
In 1873 an English scholar, Herbert Giles, a professor at Cambridge, was in China and watched a case being heard at Ningbo. He noticed something. Every official hearing cases had a book lying on the desk. He asked what it was. He was told it was the complete guide to handling cases, that no criminal matter could be dealt with without it, and that not only the magistrates but their secretaries and legal advisers each kept a copy.
The book was the Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified. It has since been translated into many languages, and the British historian of science Joseph Needham called it the greatest work on forensic medicine to appear before the scientific revolution.
Song Ci died in 1249. He was sixty-four, and had just taken up a senior post in Guangzhou when an illness of dizziness came on him in the spring. He grew weaker by the day and died in office. His body was carried back to Jianyang in Fujian for burial. The Song emperor wrote the epitaph in his own hand: the tomb of Song Gong, styled Huifu, of the name Ci. He called him a servant who had shared the burdens of the state, at home and abroad.
There is one more line in the preface that is better than the tombstone. If any colleague, Song Ci wrote, should learn something from what he had heard or seen or lived through that this collection does not contain, he asked him to write it on a slip of paper and send it, so that what was still incomplete could be completed.
He handed the half he could not finish to whoever came next.
