[“A lowly case-file clerk wants to become a judicial investigator? The court full of veteran officials laughed and called her mad!”]
Su Changqing clenched the promotion application that had been rejected. Ink blurred across the words “unsuitable for women.”
Starting with old case files riddled with errors, she memorized the criminal codes of three dynasties and spotted a bloodstained tea leaf in a wrongful murder conviction. She silenced the old clerks with seven heavily annotated volumes of the Tang Code. But when she stood in the main hall of the Court of Judicial Review, the third-rank official who had declared, “What kind of order would there be if a woman investigated cases?” could do nothing but kneel and accept the files for the twenty-year-old cold case she had solved.
