The presiding judge of the Tide Court ruled that Qin Du had wrongly copied the gate log for Mist Gate No. 3, causing the deaths of 170 people. He had three days to produce the true ledger or be executed by waist-cutting. He did not deny that the floodgate had opened for thirteen intervals, or that the tally marks were correct. But he pointed out that the times in the records had been altered: the original entry, "third interval of the Xu hour," had been crossed out with heavy ink and changed to "first interval of the Zi hour." The ink was fresh and applied with a firm hand, with marks showing through on the back of the paper. Using an old tide chronicle as his copy, he recited more than 17,000 water-level records from twelve years, then said that the entry for the third interval of the Hai hour on the night the ships capsized had been blank on the original sheet. Someone had added ink later. He demanded that the court compare the ink against the original tide-level records. He then produced the floodgate material requisition: supplies had been collected at the end of the Shen hour, and arrived at the gate at the beginning of the Xu hour. Twenty-six people had signed the night duty roster. The supplies arrived before the men, so the gate could not possibly have opened at the Zi hour. Finally, he calculated that the 170 lives lost on the two grain ships, along with compensation and the ships' value, amounted to 1,480 taels. At his annual salary of ten taels and eight qian, it would take him 137 years to repay. He also brought up the account entry for eight wen, recorded next to his seven-year-old mother, who had been listed as missing. Within three days, he had to produce the true ledger or be executed by waist-cutting. But who had first tampered with the blank entry in the original?
