In the capital, Lin’an, the proximity of the university to the court meant many students became involved in political activities that were criticized by senior government officials, who in turn didn’t hesitate to boycott classes. The situation became sufficiently alarming that Emperor Li-tsung’s notorious chief of staff, Chia Su-tao, began infiltrating student networks with spies.
The private academies, known as shu-yüan, were the only way to gain access to specialized higher learning in subjects like medicine; they included the Hanlin, the Bailudong, the Yuelu, the Chingshan, the Shugue, and the Yintianfu. In contrast to state schools, the masters at these academies taught more than the classics. Their teaching methods also included research, and masters would often present their own findings to students and then base further advances on the students’ work. Many academies—with grants from senior officials, wealthy merchants, and sometimes the state—could provide accommodations for both teachers and students. The most exclusive and influential academy, the Hanlin, was founded to train high-ranking court officials and archivists. The upper classes had easier access to such academies, and the large numbers of cultivated women in the higher echelons of society reflected the fact that females were also highly educated.
Violence: Physically violent punishments, often in the form of canings, were part of the fabric of medieval Chinese society. This was because physical pain was such a strong deterrent and because most of the population was not in a position to pay fines. Imprisonment always meant forced labor, either in the salt mines or in the army. Physical punishment was the usual recourse and was employed for any kind of ill conduct, including in the private or familial spheres.
Wu-tso: Before judges’ responsibilities were extended to include forensics, or corpse reading, these duties were carried out by the wu-tsos, poorly educated assistants who had to perform the most unsavory tasks, such as cleaning corpses, opening them up, and extracting and examining organs, while the judge would take notes. Generally, wu-tsos had other jobs as well, often as healers, butchers, or slaughterhouse workers.
Xylography: A primitive printing method using woodblocks carved with words and pictures. The carving was carried out by hand, and then watercolor paints were used as ink. The ink was transferred to the page by means of strong rubbing. The first printed book was the Diamond Sutra, stamped by Chieh Wang on May 11, 868, in China.
The first mobile printing press, made from complicated pieces of porcelain, was made in China by Sheng Bi between 1041 and 1049.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Last, but by no means least:
After years of intense work, dozens of discarded drafts, exhausting days in which the word rest lost all meaning—when, finally, you come to the last page and look on the complete manuscript—you breathe for a moment before being gripped by a painful uncertainty. You feel satisfied because you’ve given your best, but inside you something says maybe it wasn’t enough. You’d like to have studied more, revised more, made your text more vibrant and surprising. For a moment you think perhaps all this effort won’t add up to an enthusiastic readership. And in that moment you remember everyone who helped you along the way. You remember your parents’ phone calls, urgent and caring, asking, “Son, how are you? And the novel…?” You remember your brothers, the best people in the world. You remember your daughter.
You remember friends old and new. Those who have always been with you and those you’ve recently met. Friends like Santiago Morata, Fernando Marías, Antonio Penadés, Alejandro Noguera, Lucía Bartolomé, Manuel Valente, Anika Lillo, and Carlos Aimeur. Friends whose help, closeness, and care you appreciate. You remember the editors, within your country and internationally, who had confidence and bet on you. You remember Ramón Conesa, your agent at Carmen Balcells, always ready with sage advice.
They all share a space in my memory next to my readers—those who have written to me to applaud or criticize, those whose spirits I managed to lift for a few days, and even those who haven’t yet read my work, because they push me to keep going day after day. I fight for them; they make writing worth it.
A special mention for Lixiao Zhuang, cultural adviser at the Chinese Embassy in Spain, for her selfless work putting me in touch with the directors of the Chinese National Museum in Beijing, the Huqing Yutang Museum of Chinese Medicine in Hangzhou, and General Fei Yue’s Mausoleum. And I couldn’t forget Dr. Phil A. R. Hill, a bookseller in White City, London, who advised me on a wide range of books and bibliographies. I must also mention doctor of forensics Devaraj Mandal and the eminent sinologist Jacques Gernet, without whose wisdom I would have been unable to make this book as credible as it needed to be.
It is not enough to simply mention my wife, Maite. Thanks be to God, I enjoy her presence each and every day. My lighthouse when times are good and bad. She is my life’s greatest gift.
I want to dedicate my final words to someone missed by all who knew him. A quiet person, but someone from whom I learned a great deal. His behavior, humility, and honesty all taught me things that books can’t teach.
For him and in his memory.
Thank you, Eugenio.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of Spain, a former educator and industrial engineer, Antonio Garrido has received acclaim for the darkly compelling storytelling and nuanced historical details that shape his novel The Corpse Reader. This fictionalized account of the early life of Song Cí, the Chinese founding father of forensic science, represents the author’s years of research into cultural, social, legal, and political aspects of life in the Tsong dynasty, as well as his extensive study of Song Cí’s own five-volume treatise on forensics. In 2012, The Corpse Reader received the Zaragoza International Prize for best historical novel published in Spain (Premio Internacional de Novela Histórica Ciudad de Zaragoza). Antonio’s previous novel, La Escriba, was published in 2008. Garrido currently resides in Valencia, Spain.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2013 ALALA Design
Thomas Bunstead is a writer and translator based in East Sussex, England. In 2011 he was one of the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentees, working with Margaret Jull Costa. His translations include the acclaimed Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon, Anton Mallick Wants to Be Happy by Premio Nadal winner Nicolás Casariego, and “From now on, according to Schopenhauer,” an essay by Enrique Vila-Matas, which was chosen by dOCUMENTA and featured in its Book of Books. Thomas’s own writing has appeared at 3:AM Magazine, >kill author, daysofroses, ReadySteadyBook, the Paris Review blog, and in The Independent on Sunday and The Times Literary Supplement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bailey, Alison, Ronald G. Knapp, Peter Neville-Hadley, J. A. G. Roberts, and Nancy S. Steinhardt. China. Madrid: Akal, 2008.
Birge, Bettine. Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (930–1368). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.