On the night of August 23, 1557, beside a fish pond in Chun’an county in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, a man named Shao Shouzheng was killed.
He had been run through with a spear six times. The next morning his mother, Song, went to the county office and accused six members of one household of conspiring to murder her son.
The case then travelled through three county courts. Three magistrates found that the killing had been deliberate, and under the code of the Ming dynasty the sentence for that was strangulation. When the file reached the provincial judicial commission it was sent back on the ground that the offence and the punishment did not fit, and a newly arrived magistrate was told to hear the case again.
His name was Hai Rui. He was forty four years old.
One. The pond
The pond belonged to the Shao family and had come down from an earlier generation.
Shao Shouzheng and the man who killed him, Shao Shouyu, were cousins of the same generation. Under the Ming code their degree of kinship fell into the category called sima, the closest band outside a man’s own household, and the clan had a rule about the water: the two branches took it in turns to raise fish, one year at a time.
The year 1557 was Shao Shouyu’s turn, and through that year his fish were stolen again and again.
At the first watch on the night of August 23, Shao Shouzheng went to the pond with a man named Cheng Zhou to take fish. Shao Shouyu, with his adopted son, was patrolling nearby carrying a spear. Cheng Zhou saw the shapes first and heard the footsteps. He picked up the net and ran.
Shao Shouzheng did not get away. Shao Shouyu struck him once with the spear and knocked him down, and he cried out. Then Shao Shouyu struck him five more times.
The Ming code had a great deal to say about this situation, and almost none of it was in the defendant’s favour. A killing inside a family, or between neighbours, or during a theft, carried its own headings and its own tariffs. Which heading applied decided whether a man lived.
The following morning his mother Song laid a complaint. Six people, she said, had plotted together to kill her son.
Two. Three counties, one answer
The case began in Chun’an itself.
The county magistrate there, a man named Hong, found that this was no accident. His reasoning was blunt. A man who kills by mistake does not drive his weapon in six times. Six times points to a grudge.
The file went next to Sui’an county, where the magistrate read it the same way. Six thrusts were not the mark of an accident.
In Shouchang county the magistrate, Peng, attached the finding to a specific provision. He cited the section of the Ming code on theft among relatives. Where a junior member of a household brings an outsider to steal from that household, and a death results, the case is to be judged as the killing of a relative of the sima degree. For that the code prescribed strangulation.
Three counties, one conclusion. Shao Shouyu should be strangled.
The papers went up. The provincial judicial commission rejected them, on the ground that the offence and the punishment did not correspond, and ordered the case reheard by the new magistrate in Chun’an.
Three. What he found in the body
Hai Rui did not begin with the statements. He did three things.
First, he had the corpse examined again. That examination turned up something all three counties had overlooked. There was pond mud in the ears and the seven openings of the head.
What did that prove? Song had said in her complaint that her son had gone to the pond only to look at the fish and had taken no part in a theft. A man standing at the edge looking at fish does not have pond mud inside his ears. He had been in the water or at its edge, taking fish with Cheng Zhou. That much could now be taken as settled.
One further point belongs here. In the Ming a death was examined by a coroner’s assistant, who filled in a formal report setting out what had been inspected and where the injuries lay. Nothing in the rules obliged a magistrate to reopen a report that had already been filed, or to go and look at the body himself. Hai Rui did both.
Second, he tested the claim of a conspiracy of six. Hai Rui reasoned this way. If six people had genuinely agreed in advance to kill one man, there must have been a deep and long standing hatred behind it. The Shao clan was large, and large clans talk. In three years, some trace of such an arrangement would have surfaced. He looked for it and found nothing, no accomplice and no evidence of any agreement at all. The statement, he concluded, had been invented.
Third, he dealt with the six thrusts. What survives of his judgment runs like this. If you are catching a thief and the first blow does not kill him, the thief will turn and wound you. A man who drives the spear in six times does not know whether the man on the ground is dead or alive, and striking again to make certain is what the situation forces on him. Shao Shouzheng cried out when he was struck, and after that cry he said nothing else. In the dark, against a thief, hurried and in danger, with one kinsman robbing another, a man does not have the presence of mind to work out from a single cry whether the voice belongs to his cousin or to a stranger.
Four. The two statutes
Hai Rui cited two provisions of the Ming code.
The first was the one magistrate Peng had already used, on theft among relatives, which attached the killing of a sima relative to the case and prescribed strangulation.
The second came from the same section of the code, under the heading of a person entering a house at night without cause. It read in substance that anyone who enters another household at night without cause is to be beaten with eighty strokes, and that if the head of the household kills him on the spot, no offence is committed.
Hai Rui made the point plainly. Shao Shouzheng had come with an outsider to rob the household of his own relative. He had been killed on the spot, not killed after being taken into custody. By the logic of the provision, the strangulation statute did not reach him.
His finding was one sentence. This case should not be judged as the killing of a sima relative under that provision.
Shao Shouyu kept his life.
Five. What a magistrate could and could not do
What this case left behind is not a legend but a set of papers. There is an examination of a body, a statement checked clause by clause, two statutes compared word by word, and one very deliberate limit. Hai Rui did not find the man innocent. He found that he could not be strangled under that law.
In imperial Chinese justice, those are two different things, and the difference matters.
A county magistrate in the Ming was the administrator as well as the judge of first instance. He examined the scene, ordered arrests, questioned the accused, found the facts, chose the statute and fixed the sentence, all of it in one office. There was no jury, no separation between the prosecutor and the bench, and no independent defence. Above him, the prefecture, the provincial commission and the governor reviewed the file, then the Ministry of Justice and the Court of Judicial Review reviewed it again, capital cases went through the autumn assizes, and the emperor marked the final list in red. It was a long chain. But every link in it was an official reporting to another official, and what the people in a village had to work with were the two sheets of paper they could produce themselves: a complaint, and a confession.
That is why an unusual case turned on something simple. Whether a magistrate chose to examine the body a second time, or to ask whether a statement sounded as if it had been made up, was almost entirely up to him.
English speaking readers usually meet Chinese judging through a series of novels. The Dutch diplomat Robert van Gulik wrote a whole cycle of Judge Dee mysteries in the 1940s, and in those books the county magistrate is detective, prosecutor and judge at once. Hai Rui and the Shao case came nearly four centuries earlier, and the casebook tradition that van Gulik drew on can be seen at work in these pages.
Readers who come to Chinese detective stories looking for a locked room will find something else here. Nobody has to work out who held the spear. The puzzle is what the evidence can be made to carry, and whether the man sitting in judgment is willing to go and look.
It is worth naming that tradition, because it is one of the things China contributed to the world. In the Song dynasty, Zheng Ke compiled a collection of criminal cases with commentary for the guidance of officials. A little later, in 1247, Song Ci wrote the Collected Writings on the Washing Away of Wrongs, the earliest systematic treatise on forensic medicine to survive anywhere, three hundred years before anything comparable in Europe. The Hai Rui file belongs to the same family of documents: rulings written so that the next official would know how it had been done.
Six. The magistrate who wrote down a principle
Hai Rui later became one of the three names ordinary Chinese attach to the phrase an upright official, alongside Bao Zheng and Kuang Zhong. But beyond his reputation for austerity, he left behind a passage on judging that is still quoted, and still argued over.
In his collected works, in a section on reform, he set out a rule for difficult cases. Where the facts of a suit cannot be established, he wrote, it is better to wrong the elder brother than the younger, and better to wrong the uncle than the nephew. It is better to wrong the rich man than the poor man, and better to wrong the simple and honest man than the cunning one. In a dispute over property, wrong the local magnate rather than the commoner, because that corrects an abuse. In a dispute over face and form, wrong the commoner rather than the magnate, because that preserves the order of things.
Read now, the passage is uncomfortable. It is not adjudication by law at all. It is a formula for distributing defeat by seniority, wealth and rank. Modern scholars have given it a name and treat it as a theory of its own, and they divide over it. Some argue it fitted the society it was written for. Others put it more flatly: this is not justice, this is using a verdict to hold a hierarchy together.
And what Hai Rui did with the case of the fish pond was something else again. He did not distribute a defeat. He examined a body, checked a statement against the record, and set two statutes side by side. Then he wrote one sentence and stopped.
A man’s stated principles and the single case he actually handled do not always point the same way. Whoever reads the file can see it more clearly than whoever reads the famous line.
That is also what makes the case useful to anyone reading Chinese true crime. The famous names get remembered for the lines they wrote. The work is visible only in the papers, and the papers survive.
Seven. Afterwards
In Chun’an, Hai Rui cleared several wrongful convictions. His reputation reached the neighbouring counties, and difficult cases were sent to him to be heard jointly.
Chun’an was a poor county, and from his first weeks he was measuring land, restraining the powerful families and reforming the post stations, so that officials passing through were served by the book and charged nothing extra. That work made him no fewer enemies than the judging did.
He went on to serve as magistrate elsewhere, then in the Ministry of Revenue, and eventually as governor of Yingtian, the province around Nanjing. He was dismissed more than once and was brought back more than once. As governor he pushed through a tax reform that consolidated levies into a single payment, and he ordered land seized by powerful families returned to the peasants who had held it. He made too many enemies to last, and was removed within a year. He died in office in Nanjing in 1587, leaving a room with a few old clothes and a bamboo chest.
As for the case of 1557, the file records nothing of what became of the mother, or of the widow, or of what the man thought as he lay in the water with a spear wound in him and five more blows coming. Three things survive.
A body with pond mud in its ears. A statement that was shown to have been invented. And two statutes, compared word by word.
With those three things, Hai Rui took a rope away from a man’s neck and put it back in the file.
A file like this one is a rare object. Most criminal cases in the Ming ended with a sentence and a report, and neither was written to be read four hundred years later. What survives of this one survives because a magistrate disagreed with three of his colleagues and put his reasons down on paper in order.
