The Lacquer Screen
1962 novel by Robert van Gulik
The Lacquer Screen is a gong'an detective novel written by Robert van Gulik and set in Imperial China (the early decades of the Tang dynasty). It is a fiction based on the real character of Judge Dee (Ti Jen-chieh or Di Renjie), a magistrate and statesman of the Tang court, who lived roughly 630, 700 AD.
The book features fourteen illustrations by the author.
01Plot introduction
In 663, Judge Dee is the young magistrate in the fictional Chinese town of Peng-lai. On a visit to a senior magistrate Teng in Wei-ping, he is shown a beautiful lacquer screen which is mysteriously altered to show a murder scene instead of a love scene. With the senior magistrate Teng convinced he is going insane, a wealthy banker in town appears to kill himself, though it might be murder. Judge Dee and his servant Chiao Tai disguise themselves to go undercover and join a gang of robbers to solve the case.
The town of Peng-lai was the setting for other Judge Dee stories including: The Chinese Gold Murders, and three of the short stories from Judge Dee at Work.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “The Lacquer Screen”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- LacquerScreen.JPG by Unknown author, Fair use
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