The Young Bao Zheng: Records of the Green Coroner

Synopsis of The Young Bao Zheng: The Records of the Azure Coroner

On rainy nights in Bianjing, there are always countless wronged souls with stories left untold.

When Qiu Yingying was twelve, she knelt on the straw mat in the mortuary and drove a silver needle through her elder brother's throat. The moment blood welled up, she swore to become a coroner. It was the dirtiest, hardest work in the world, and she was determined that a woman would do it. She trudged through the mud on the stone streets, kept watch at the mortuary for seven nights, touched rotting corpses, and glimpsed moonlight in livor mortis, all so that every silent body could speak and the wronged could receive justice.

When the young Bao Zheng first arrived at Kaifeng Prefecture, he heard that a female coroner had joined the staff. Everyone scoffed: “A coroner has to handle corpses and bones. What place is there for a girl?” But when Qiu Yingying lifted the straw mat, used bamboo tweezers to pick dirt from beneath the dead person's fingernails, and tested the throat with a silver needle to reveal a dark red strangulation mark, even the old coroner said with red-rimmed eyes, “This girl is cleverer than a ghost.” Only then did everyone realize that a woman's eyes could be sharper than a blade and brighter than a candle.

An unidentified woman found beneath the Yuhé Bridge, and half a copper coin inscribed “Tiansheng Tongbao,” tore open the first crack in the case. From the body's livor mortis, Qiu Yingying saw signs of suffocation. She matched the cinnabar mole behind the woman's ear to the corpse of a petty thief brought to the mortuary three days earlier. Meanwhile, Bao Zheng traced the faint marks on the coin to an unsolved silver robbery from three years ago. When the two coins formed the complete inscription “Tiansheng,” and the cinnabar mole behind the woman's ear matched the description in the old case files, a conspiracy spanning life and death began to crawl slowly out of Bianjing's gutters and toward the light.

She is a female coroner; he is a young magistrate. One examines corpses and bones to seek the truth, while the other solves cases and unravels mysteries. When society says, “Women shouldn't handle things of the dead,” he