Song dynasty scholar hides his family, marries into the palace and meets the one judge who will not bow to the throne.
How a poor student who topped the imperial examinations became China’s most famous bigamist, and what the legend of his death says about justice, power and the Song dynasty
A village scholar takes first place in the imperial examinations, hides the wife and two children he left behind, and marries into the imperial family. When his wife reaches the capital and knocks on his door, he sends a killer after her and the children. The assassin cannot go through with it and takes his own life. The case lands before Bao Zheng (包拯), the incorruptible Northern Song official whom later centuries turned into the favorite judge of Chinese storytelling. Under pressure from the empress dowager and the princess, he calls for the most feared blade in the legal imagination of China: the guillotine with the dragon’s head.
This is the next episode of our series on crime and punishment in ancient China. The previous one followed a roadside murder in Song dynasty China and the oldest insect evidence in a criminal case. This time the setting is again the eleventh century, but the case belongs to a different kind of record: not a forensic handbook, but the stage and the storyteller’s table. As in the first episode, we tell the story first and then check it against what the sources allow us to say.
The Scholar and the Wife Who Stayed Behind
In the version everyone in China knows, Chen Shimei (陈世美) is a poor scholar from the countryside. His wife, Qin Xianglian (秦香莲), keeps the household running. She looks after his parents and their two children, a boy called Winter Boy (冬哥) and a girl called Spring Maid (春妹), so that her husband has time to study. It is the classic bargain of the Chinese examination family: one person’s years of work are paid for by the silent labor of everyone else at home.
The bargain pays off. Chen travels to the capital, Kaifeng (开封), to sit the imperial examinations, which under the Song had become the main road into government service. Emperors of the dynasty expanded both the examinations and the school system, and by the eleventh century a talented young man without connections could hope to reach the top. Chen does more than hope. He takes first place and becomes a zhuangyuan (状元), the champion of the highest examination.
Success changes him. The emperor offers him the hand of a princess, and Chen, who has never mentioned his first marriage to anyone at court, accepts. Sources differ on the exact relationship: the Peking opera version makes her the emperor’s sister, while other summaries of the tale call Chen the emperor’s new son-in-law. What does not change is the shape of the lie. A man who owes everything to his wife’s labor erases her in order to climb.
The Palace Gate and the Sword
Back home, a famine kills Chen’s parents. Qin Xianglian takes the children and walks to the capital to find her husband. She finds him in a palace, married to a princess and surrounded by servants. Chen denies knowing her.
Then he does something worse than deny her. He orders his bodyguard Han Qi (韩琪) to kill the woman and the children, so that no one can ever contradict his new story. In some tellings Han Qi is a servant rather than a bodyguard; in all of them he is the man who is asked to do the killing and cannot.
The scene is set at a shrine called Sanguantang (三官堂). Qin begs the assassin to spare the children and raise them as his own. Han Qi, moved by her innocence, lets them go and kills himself. His sword stays behind with Qin, and it becomes the single most important piece of physical evidence in the story. The would-be murderer has become, after his death, the only witness for the prosecution.
The Judge Who Would Not Be Moved
Qin Xianglian carries her case to Bao Zheng. In the opera version the judge does not simply take her word. He travels to her hometown to confirm her story, and when he returns he gives Chen one more chance to acknowledge his wife. Chen denies her again and denies sending an assassin. Qin produces Han Qi’s sword. Bao finds Chen guilty of attempted murder and of deceiving the emperor.
This is where the case stops being a family tragedy and becomes a story about power. The princess and the empress dowager press Bao to drop the matter. When he refuses, an imperial edict arrives pardoning Chen, and Bao, bound by the throne, reluctantly obeys. He offers Qin money and tells her he intends to resign. She refuses the money and collapses from grief. Bao changes his mind and decides to carry out the sentence anyway. The empress dowager reminds him that defying an imperial edict is itself a capital offense. Bao takes off his official cap, the gesture of a man putting his office and his life on the table, and the execution goes ahead.
The crowd, in the opera’s final image, gives him the title that would stick to him forever: Bao Qingtian (包青天), “Bao of the Clear Sky.”
The Guillotine with the Dragon’s Head
The Chinese title of the story, Zha Mei An (铡美案), means “the case of cutting down Shimei”, and the blade is the center of the legend. In dramatizations Bao Zheng commands a set of three guillotines with animal heads. The dog-headed one is for commoners, the tiger-headed one for officials, and the dragon-headed one for members of the imperial house. A man who has become an imperial relative by marriage dies under the dragon’s blade, a detail that tells the audience something no courtroom speech could: the law reaches even the throne’s own family.
It is worth keeping the dragon of the guillotine apart from the other dragon in Bao’s story. The nickname “Dragon-Design Bao” (包龙图) belongs to the judge himself and appears in the titles of the Ming collections of his cases. The guillotine is a stage property that grew out of the same cycle of tales. For a sense of how deeply the dragon runs through Chinese imagery, see our gallery of traditional paintings of Chinese dragons and other legendary creatures.
The Real Bao Zheng
Bao Zheng was a real person, and his life is much less theatrical than his legend, which makes it more interesting. He was born in 999 near present-day Hefei and passed the highest examination at twenty-nine. Because he put off taking office for about a decade to care for his parents and observe mourning after their deaths, his career began late. As magistrate of Tianchang he earned a reputation as a shrewd judge. In 1040 he became prefect of Duanzhou, where he put an end to the practice of collecting surplus inkstones to bribe ministers, and he left in 1043 without taking a single inkstone home.
In 1044 he became an investigating censor, and over the next two years he submitted at least thirteen memorials on military affairs, taxation, the examination system and official dishonesty. His most famous clash was with the uncle of the emperor’s favorite consort. In 1050 Bao and two other censors attacked Zhang Yaozuo (张尧佐) for incompetence, and when the emperor, Renzong (宋仁宗), softened the blow by handing Zhang other posts, Bao protested again. In the English rendering of the second memorial, he tells the throne that “if your majesty is determined to appoint Yaozuo, then expel this advisor”. It is a sentence that explains why the Chinese public later believed him capable of defying an empress dowager.
Decades later a writer named Zhu Bian (朱弁) recorded in Qu Wei Jiu Wen (曲洧旧闻) a humorous anecdote in which Bao argued so passionately that spittle landed on the emperor’s face. Modern scholarship treats the anecdote as a piece of popular lore rather than official record, and it likely helped fuel the legend.
In 1057 and 1058 Bao served as prefect of Kaifeng, and his reforms there fit the legend closely. He allowed citizens to lodge complaints directly with city administrators, bypassing the clerks who were suspected of taking bribes at the door. The tradition that an ordinary person could walk up and be heard by a judge, which Qin Xianglian’s story dramatizes, has a real root here. Bao died in 1062, aged sixty-three. His biography in the Song Shi (宋史), chapter 316, records the family instruction he left behind: any descendant who took bribes as an official could not return home and could not be buried in the family graveyard, and anyone who disregarded the rule was no descendant of his.
What the Sources Do Not Say
Here we come to the point where the case has to be honest about its category. Chen Shimei is described in reference works as a character of Chinese opera and fiction, and the case belongs to what scholars call gong’an (公案) literature, the Chinese tradition of court-case stories. Bao Zheng’s real life, as far as the biographical sources used for this article go, is the life of an upright censor and administrator, not the career of a detective-judge who sentences imperial relatives to death. The distance between the two is about five centuries.
The earliest text discussed in the sources for this article is a Ming dynasty collection of 1594, Legal Cases of A Hundred Families Judged by Dragon-Design Bao (包龙图判百家公案). Its story number 26 is titled “Lady Qin’s Ghost Returns and Is Matched with Shimei” (秦氏还魂配世美), and it presents the wife as “Lady Qin”. In that early version she is killed by assassins, and her ghost seeks justice from Bao. The later and more familiar version removes the supernatural element: the assassin spares the family and kills himself. A 1595 collection of Bao’s cases is reported to contain the story already with the same names for the children that the opera uses.
The legend also has relatives. One of the eight ballad-stories translated by the Harvard scholar Wilt L. Idema in Judge Bao and the Rule of Law (2010) features a brother-in-law of the emperor who kills a student and the student’s infant son. Those ballad-stories, rediscovered in a tomb near Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution and dated by Idema to the period 1250 to 1450, show a Bao who imposes the law even on the emperor’s circle. They are not the Chen Shimei tale, but they show the same appetite for a judge who cannot be bought by rank.
The version most Chinese audiences know today comes from a much later stage. Peking opera arose in the Qing dynasty and is generally regarded as having fully formed by 1845. The famous confrontation with the empress dowager, the edict and the removal of Bao’s cap come from that theatrical tradition.
For a true crime series, this changes what kind of story we are telling. It is a case about cases: a story that Chinese audiences kept retelling for centuries because it answered a question the real legal system could not always answer, namely whether anyone could hold the powerful to account.
The Judge’s Own Words: Where to Read Them in English
Readers who want to meet Bao Zheng in his own words have a few reliable paths, and it is worth being clear about their limits.
For the historical Bao, the memorials against Zhang Yaozuo are preserved in the Xu Zizhi Tongjian Changbian (续资治通鉴长编), chapters 168 and 169, and his biography is in the Song Shi, chapter 316. English renderings of the passages quoted above appear in the English Wikipedia article on Bao Zheng, which cites those chapters but does not name a translator. The standard scholarly biography in English is Chang Fu-jui’s “Pao Cheng” in Sung Biographies (1976).
For the legend, the essential English-language work is Wilt L. Idema’s Judge Bao and the Rule of Law: Eight Ballad-Stories from the Period 1250-1450 (World Scientific, 2010). For the Qin Xianglian story in its stage form, there is an English translation of the Peking opera by Yang Xianyi (杨宪益) and Gladys Yang, The Forsaken Wife (A Pingchu Opera), published by Foreign Languages Press in 1958. A study of Judge Bao’s tales in English was also published by Susan Blader as Tales of Magistrate Bao (1998).
A Byword for Betrayal
Few Chinese stories have traveled as far into everyday speech. Chen Shimei is a byword in Chinese for a heartless, unfaithful man, and calling someone “a Chen Shimei” needs no explanation. The story has been filmed and televised many times, from a 1964 film and an opera film of the same year to the 1993 television series Justice Pao, a 2004 production called The New Case of Beheading Chen Shimei, and the 2008 series Justice Bao.
It has had a second life online as well. In 2019 a remix sampling a line from the opera spread worldwide as the “Chin Cheng Hanji” meme, usually paired with a clip of cartoon cat and mouse. In 2021 the same audio was recycled in memes mocking China’s social credit system. A story about a husband who erased his wife for rank has become, in the age of the internet, a sound that people attach to anything involving surveillance, punishment or betrayal.
The more disturbing reading is the one the legend itself offers. The empress dowager and the princess do not deny the crime; they argue that the criminal belongs to the palace. Bao’s answer is that no one does. Whether any real official of the eleventh century ever said that to a court is something the surviving sources cannot confirm. That centuries of audiences wanted to believe someone had is, perhaps, the stronger historical fact.
The theme of how the imperial legal system treated women who stood accused is something we have explored through images in our gallery of torture punishments inflicted on adulteresses in ancient China. For the visual record of how Western observers saw punishment under the next dynasties, see Western depictions of crime and punishment during the Qing dynasty. Bao’s later reputation as a figure tied to the underworld judges is a good companion to the eighteen layers of Chinese Hell and to our introduction to Chinese gods and folk religion. More on the history of the period can be found in our China history section.
Source:
- Wikipedia, “Chen Shimei and Qin Xianglian” (plot, names, origins, adaptations, memes)
- Wikipedia, “Judge Bao fiction” (Ming collections, Cases Judged by the Dragon-Design, Idema’s translation)
- Wikipedia, “Bao Zheng” (biography, memorials, family instruction, guillotines, Zhu Bian anecdote), citing Song Shi ch. 316; Xu Zizhi Tongjian Changbian chs. 168 to 169; Chang Fu-jui, “Pao Cheng,” in Sung Biographies (1976); Wilt L. Idema, Judge Bao and the Rule of Law (2010); Susan Blader, Tales of Magistrate Bao (1998)
- Wilt L. Idema, “The Image of Kaifeng in the Ballad Stories of the Period 1250-1450,” Harvard University (dash.harvard.edu)
- Robert E. Hegel, review of Idema, Judge Bao and the Rule of Law, Project MUSE; review in Asian Ethnology 70/1 (2011)
- Wikipedia, “Imperial examination” and “Peking opera”
- Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, The Forsaken Wife (A Pingchu Opera), Foreign Languages Press, 1958
Topics: who was Chen Shimei in Chinese legend, story of Judge Bao and Chen Shimei, why Chen Shimei was executed by Judge Bao, what is the dragon-head guillotine in Chinese opera
Featured image: Portraits of Famous Men – Bao Zheng, source
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