Might vs. Wit

The Monkey and The Tiger - Robert van Gulik

This is Book #6 of the 17 historical mysteries starring Judge Dee. The unique stories are set in different Chinese provinces from about 663 to 681.

This volume contains two particularly charming and interesting stories whose titles are based on the Chinese zodiac and, in particular, on the characteristic differences of the Yang forces of the Tiger (might, nerve, luck) and the Monkey (cleverness, wit, creativity).

Both stories have a rapid development of the plot and details about everyday life in China during one of its golden ages, the T’ang era. The beginning of the first story (The Monkey) is atmospheric in that the author sets the tale in a tropical forest, like a fairy tale, while in the second story (The Tiger) Judge Dee finds himself in fortress besieged, like a feudal adventure story.

Without deep psychological descriptions, van Gulik still creates vibrant characters with human interest. In The Monkey is a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis. He falls for a young beautiful bandit girl and gets the notion to walk away from his humdrum life to join a band of highwaymen. In The Tiger, by observing the portrait and belongings of the deceased, Judge Dee gets insight into a personality and identifies the great obsession – the yearning for freedom - that had dominated a life.

Both short stories have their own attractions. In The Monkey, there are lessons on how to approach cases that Judge Dee imparts to his assistant Tao Gan. Although he is cunning and slick on the streets, ex-con man Tao Gan lacks the experience of his boss and inevitably inflicts his biases on the evidence. In The Tiger, the author successfully describes the aftermath of a flood of the Yellow River and the melancholy mood of Judge Dee.

In other stories, Judge Dee is always surrounded by powerful assistants to provide muscle, sometimes beating and torturing information out of people of interest. In the situation of The Tiger, however, he faces a dangerous situation in an isolated country manor, in a position of weakness and loneliness, his authority as a high-ranking official having no meaning against a band of brigands called The Flying Tigers. The time frame of this story is only one night, so he does not have much time to conjure up a plan to save himself and other innocents from a catastrophic end. Professor van Gulik also slips in a warning about keeping love and desire firmly apart, since no man – not the smart, not the powerful, not the capable – is exempt from the proverb, “It's not the beauty of a woman that blinds the man, the man blinds himself.”

Dr. van Gulik was not blessed with a long life (he died at the age of 57 in 1967), but being Dutch, he was a demon for work. On top of his day job in diplomacy, he wrote the 17 Judge Dee novels. And he managed to produce scholarly items on such curious topics as the role of the lute and the gibbon in traditional Chinese arts. 

When he recommended the Judge Dee stories to the class, my Sunwui-born professor of Chinese history said that van Gulick wrote Sexual Life in Ancient China but that he never read it because the social role of concubinage and prostitution was out of his field. The class rather slumped at hearing that despite the exciting title, the book did not deal with the deep subject of Chinese sexual lore.