Excerpt from The Shadow of the Empire by Qiu Xiaolong, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

ONE

'Honorable Judge Dee ...'

Dee Renjie, the newly appointed Imperial Circuit Supervisor of the Tang Empire, put down the routine report that had been submitted to him earlier in the day, stroking his white-streaked beard and shaking his head reflectively, as if at someone sitting opposite him across the rough, unpainted wooden table in the room of a dilapidated hostel. The hostel was located on the outskirts of Chang'an, the grand capital of the Tang Empire.

Dee was no judge. For the moment, however, he had no objection to people addressing him as such. It sounded far less impressive, further away from the center of the imperial power, though he was in no mood to do anything judge-like whatsoever in the midst of the ferocious political infighting around the throne.

In various official positions during his long, checkered official career, Dee had found himself involved, from time to time, in investigations – even when serving as the prime minister or in other high-ranking official positions. In the Tang system, he had to serve, more often than not, as a multifunctional official with both the executive and judicial powers combined in one position. As he had solved a number of sensitive political cases that had proven to be too difficult for others, people had chosen to simply call him Judge Dee.

In the days of the increasingly fierce power struggle at the imperial court, the title 'judge' had somehow turned into a neutral one, acceptable both to the Wu and the Li factions at the top, he reflected in the trembling candlelight, folding his hands around a cup of lukewarm Dragon Well tea.

The edge of the cup appeared, all of a sudden, to be sharply dented. Rubbing his eyes, he touched it gingerly with his lips in the dimness of the room. He felt so fatigue-laden, not just with the trip that had hardly started but with a lot of other things as well.

For his newly appointed position, Judge Dee had to travel out of the capital to another province, and then still to another. He had left his residence at the center of Chang'an in the morning, and he was now staying incognito for the night at the hostel. The official rank of a circuit supervisor might not have appeared very low to others, but it came as a subtle demotion to him. The Empress Wu had decided to get Judge Dee out of the capital – at least for a short while – with the two factions being engaged in a cut-throat political battle at the pinnacle of power.

Judge Dee had been swept into it because of a memorial he had recently made to the empress, who was debating with herself as to whether her nephew, Internal Minister Wu of the Wu family, or Prince Li, her son with the late emperor of the Li family, would be officially designated as the successor to the throne of the Tang Empire. Like other Confucian scholar-turned-officials, Judge Dee found unacceptable the idea that an imperial concubine-turned-empress would contrive to have someone from the Wu family chosen as the successor for the throne of the Li family, and argued that it was in the time-honored orthodox tradition for the supreme ruler to pick the successor in the son, rather than in the nephew, for the sake of a legitimate, peaceful, and uncontroversial power transition for the empire. While the empress had long regarded Dee as one of the capable, honest officials she could trust, she was nonetheless upset with his bookish argument based on the orthodox Confucian discourse.

To make things worse, the prince happened to have been caught in a scandalous affair with a palace lady. Because of the opposition of old-fashioned officials like Judge Dee, the empress reluctantly agreed not to disown the prince there and then, but she wanted him out of the capital temporarily. And Judge Dee's new official post entailed his traveling out of Chang'an.

Excerpted from The Shadow of the Empire by Qiu Xiaolong. Copyright © 2022 by Qiu Xiaolong. Excerpted by permission of Severn House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.