Chapter 4: Song Ci, Father of Forensics (1/2)

Grandpa tapped his back with his fist over and over again, trying to massage the pain away.

“Let’s go home,” he said. “This place is too gloomy, and my arthritis is acting up again because of the chill. We’ll talk when we’re back home, okay?”

An hour later, we were both safe and warm at home. Grandpa brewed a pot of ginger tea to warm himself up.

“You must be curious, my boy,” he said. “We, the Song family, have always been coroners for generations, so why is there such a rule against becoming a police officer or a judge? Well, there is a very concrete reason.”

During the Southern Song dynasty in the thirteenth century, there was an outstanding official who served as a presiding judge in criminal courts whose name was Song Ci. All his life, he efficiently solved many difficult cases and he was a talented official who surpassed all his predecessors.

Song Ci was determined in avoiding miscarriages of justices. When he served as a presiding judge, he solved countless cases of wrongly punished crimes and got the right perpetrator. He solved many cases that seemed to have dead end and managed to capture more than two hundred criminals in just eight months. There were no complaints of misjustice after his tenure, and his achievements astounded both the court officials and the common folk.

But no matter how great Song Ci was, he understood that the power of one person was limited — he couldn’t make lasting changes if he worked alone. He knew that there were still many other Coroners who never cared for a fair investigation and trial, but instead relied on using violence to extort a confession out of the suspects with utter disregard for human lives. It was just as the ancient saying went — a drop of ink on an official document can cost a sea of blood.

Hence, Song Ci recorded everything he learnt from his studies and experiments in the Collected Cases of Injustices Rectified. To call this book revolutionary would be an understatement — with this book, Song Ci single-handedly founded the science of forensics, three hundred years before the scientific advances that happened in the west. Because of this, he was now globally acknowledged as the forefather of forensics.

After Song Ci, members of the Song family had always served the Imperial Ministry of Justice and the Dali Temple generation after generation. Gradually, the contents of the Collected Cases of Injustices Rectified kept expanding and the body of knowledge in crime solving and detection grew larger and larger, until it was all recorded in the Chronicles of Grand Magistrates.

But when you were as outstanding as the Song family back then, you could just as easily fall into a precarious position where you became the target for vengeance from the criminals or the family of the punished murderers. Our profound knowledge turned out to be a double-edged sword. Not only that, our out-of-this-world skills became an attractive thing to be used by other people. In the Ming dynasty, a member of the Song family investigated a strange case involving a nine-tailed fox, but eventually he sniffed out a plan for a coup d'etat. He was eventually used as a scapegoat and was punished to death together with the nine generations of his family.

Then there was a member of Song family later who was proficient in numerology. He theorized that the knowledge the family wielded was simply too profound that it disrupted the balance of good and evil in nature, tempting the wrath of the gods and the spirits. Therefore, any member of the Song family who became a judge, a police officer, or a coroner would all be met with calamities! From then on, the rule was set: no member of Song family should ever dabble into those professions in order to preserve their lives.

This account frustrated me for a bit. I was slightly incredulous too.

“But Grandpa,” I protested, “aren’t you co-operating with the police yourself even now?”

Grandpa sighed.

“When I was young,” he said, “I loved solving crimes, just like you. I helped the police break many cases that shocked the whole country, and earned reputation and fame in the process. I had no idea that calamity would soon fall upon me. Not long after solving a big case, someone informed me saying that my method of dead body examination was a superstition left over from the feudal society. I was immediately thrown into a labour camp where I had to live and work in the stables for three long, bitter years. If I had been exonerated and released any later than that, I would’ve ended up a completely broken man.”

Grandpa turned stonily silent for a moment after recounting this part of his life. He then took a sip of the ginger tea and continued.

“I was too eager to show off my talents at a young age,” he said, “and I completely ignored the warnings of our ancestors because I was too set in my own ways, just as iron is brittle because it is too hard and can’t be bent. I decided to just hide at home after that and heed our ancestors’ warning, but my reputation had spread too far. Every few years I would get an invitation to work with the authorities. I had to refuse them, not because it was my wish, but for our own good. In the end, I had to compromise and start co-operating with the police secretly. I thought that our family would finally be safe after my generation, but now it turns out that you are trying to walk down the very same path that I did. Perhaps it is a cruel game that fate is playing with us, perhaps it is a curse our family has to endure, but perhaps it is also our mission and purpose!”

At this point, Grandpa’s words started to confuse me. Did he wish that I would follow his footsteps and become a Traditional Coroner, or was that still out of the question?

“Now that you’ve passed the test,” he continued, “from this day onwards I will pass on everything I’ve learnt all my life to you. Do you want to learn them, my boy?”

“Of course I do, Grandpa!” I answered, all fired up.