Ming Dynasty: Documents Have Sound

In the last years of Chenghua, the Nanjing Criminal Department received a surrender letter of unknown origin. The name of the person on the confession was Lu Cen, who had been interrogated three years ago; but on the last page of the confession, it was written about the theft of salt, the diversion of the escort, and a witness who should not have appeared after his death. Gu Heng, a low-level clerk in the Ministry of Punishments, was ordered to copy old cases. He did not have a knife, nor the identity of a royal guard. All he could rely on was the fiber of the paper, the order of ink, the weight of the seal, the binding of the file, the title in the confession, and the mismatched accounts. When he discovered that this was not an isolated false complaint, but a chain of old cases that had been repeatedly buried by government procedures, investigating the truth was no longer just about speaking for the dead. Some people want to hide a group of people who should be held accountable forever in "compliance" files through supplementary registration, transfer of cases, re-copying and cancellation of files; others believe that as long as the state machinery can still function, by sacrificing a few nameless officials and a few ownerless lives, local stability and officialdom can be restored. Gu Heng started from the docket room of the Nanjing Criminal Department and traced the accounts of salt import, water transportation, military salary and local justice. He faced not only murderers who were good at silencing people, but also smart opponents who were familiar with every crack in the system. He must prove one thing before the evidence will be burned, his companions may defect, and he may be included in the criminal record: the record is not a paper to cover up power, and the procedure cannot be an excuse to kill. It was a conspiracy that began with a surrender letter written three years after his death. What Gu Heng wanted to find out was not who wrote the false confession, but who made everyone believe it was true.