New Pleas to a Judge for the Ages

When it comes to Chinese officials, cleanliness is next to godliness.

And that brings crowds flocking to a temple in this former imperial capital, where they offer food and incense and kneel before the statue of a man who lived 1,000 years ago: Judge Bao Zheng, China’s most famous “clean” official.

His myth fed by abundant folklore and detective stories, Judge Bao is a household name in China.

Although most people visit the temple as tourists or out of simple respect, some stuff allegations of modern-day corruption into the donation box in front of the statue. Others write letters addressed: “Kaifeng Prefecture, Judge Bao Temple, Attention: Judge Bao.”

“They know perfectly well that this man lived a thousand years ago, but they send the letters anyway out of desperation,” said Li Liangxue, an expert on Bao at the Kaifeng Municipal Museum in central China’s Henan province.

China has only begun to build the institutions that would make the entreaties to Judge Bao obsolete. But for now, he is the last hope for many Chinese seeking justice and relief from corrupt officials.

To ordinary people, “Judge Bao is justice incarnate,” Peking University historian Zhang Xiqing said.

As Kaifeng’s magistrate, Judge Bao let complainants come directly into the great hall where he heard their cases, past lower officials who might otherwise try to extort money in exchange for letting them in.

This ancient tradition of appealing grievances to top officials continues to this day. Citizens who cannot get satisfaction from local officials often take their cases all the way to Beijing, the capital. Some live for decades in Beijing’s “petitioners’ village,” searching for a fair-minded, Judge Bao-like figure who will hear their case.

Others, locals here say, have tried to attract attention to their plight by lying on railroad tracks or throwing themselves at the passing motorcades of top officials.

Chinese leaders who have stood up for the common people have invited comparisons to Judge Bao, including the country’s charismatic premier, Zhu Rongji.

Zhu’s stern appearance and blunt speech, hatred of bureaucrats’ corruption and waste, and professed willingness to challenge the powerful and champion the poor all fit the cultural archetype of the qing guan, or upright official, that Judge Bao represents.

“Zhu is held in high esteem among many older Chinese citizens, especially those who cling to the traditional mode of thought that Judge Bao will save the world,” observed the April issue of the newsmagazine Nanfeng Chuang.

Bao and Zhu are heirs to a tradition of Chinese populism known as minben sixiang. This school of thought held that, as Bao wrote in a memorandum in 1059, “the people are the root of the state.” It also held that rulers shouldn’t constrict people’s livelihoods or persecute them for speaking their minds.

“Pacifying the people depends on carefully selecting local officials and gradually getting rid of arbitrary taxes,” Bao wrote in the memorandum.

Chinese are increasingly realizing that Judge Bao’s tradition, while humane, is still far from any modern notion of democracy, individual rights or legal due process that the country is trying to cultivate.

As Kaifeng’s magistrate, Bao served as detective, prosecutor, judge and jury all in one. He famously tricked or tortured confessions out of suspected criminals with the use of branding irons, finger clamps or numerous strokes of the birch pole, all of which were customary and legal at the time.

Judge Bao’s demigod status owes much to popular mythologizing in opera, plays and novels. In recent years, several television series about his sleuthing exploits have become wildly popular from the Korean peninsula to Vietnam.

Novels based on Judge Bao’s adventures are part of a popular genre of Chinese detective fiction that preceded Sherlock Holmes by several centuries. In the stories, Judge Bao uses his powers of observation and intuition to solve convoluted murder plots and palace intrigues. His ex-convict lieutenants go undercover into the criminal underworld and supply the stories with kung fu action.

Although loosely based on historical cases, the stories are fantastically embellished. In the case of “Swapping the Leopard Cub and the Prince,” Judge Bao gets the suspect drunk, then poses as the king of hell to dupe him into confessing. In another case, he finds a kidnapped woman imprisoned under a bell in a Buddhist temple after the Buddha indicates her location to him in a dream.

While less familiar to most Chinese than the literary version, the real Bao Zheng was actually a historically significant official and reformer during the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

After acing his civil service exam in 1027, Bao deferred work for a decade to perform the duties of a good Confucian son. He stayed home to care for his aged parents for seven years, mourned their deaths for three and finally began his 26-year official career at age 39.

In his various central government posts, Bao wrote scores of memorandums to the emperor, criticizing his mistakes and calling by name for the impeachment of more than 60 officials, some of whom had ties to the imperial family.

Bao was never demoted or otherwise punished in a political culture where high-ranking advisors and officials could be executed for offering the emperor their opinions too candidly.

“Despite Bao’s direct speech,” observed the Kaifeng museum’s Li, “the emperor knew he was a loyal minister.”

There are two other Judge Bao temples in mainland China, as well as ones in Taiwan, Singapore and Macao. Judge Bao’s family tomb was discovered in the 1970s and ceremoniously relocated to his hometown in Anhui province’s Bao village, where almost everyone has the surname Bao, including Judge Bao’s 30th-generation descendants.