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Abstract

The character of Judge Bao, which derives from the historical Bao Zheng (999-1062), starts to make his appearance in the various genres of vernacular literature in the period 1250-1450. While vernacular stories (huaben) and plays (zaju and xiwen) on Judge Bao have been widely known throughout the twentieth century and have been analyzed repeatedly, the ballad-stories (cihua) on Judge Bao were only discovered nearby in Jiading, Zhejiang in 1967. While the initial publication of the facsimile edition of the ballad-stories created quite a stir and resulted in a number of publications, this initial enthusiasm soon ebbed away and the new materials had little impact on the presentation of the development of the legend of Judge Bao. While this may have been due to the relative rarity of the ballad-stories even after the publication of the facsimile edition, this was also due to the conventional view which considered ballad-stories as products of the Ming and so as later and derivative. But this is mostly likely a mistake. As some scholars have stressed, whereas the surviving works of vernacular stories and plays tend to be preserved in late and revised editions, the ballad-stories have been preserved in relatively early editions and show no clear signs of revision. Rather than treating the ballad-stories as later than huaben and zaju they should at least be treated as contemporaneous. As has been pointed out before, in many cases the ballad stories may well have served as sources of zaju rather than the other way around. In contrast to the tepid zaju texts that have come down to us by way of the Office for Bell and Drum (Zhonggusi), many ballad-stories show high officials abusing their power and committing murder at will and an emperor who is willing to bend the law in order to protect his relatives. They show a world in which power and crime go hand in hand and thereby judicial authority and independence becomes an urgent issue.

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107

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