A man named Song of Jiaxing was magistrate of Xianyou. He was austerely upright by habit and styled himself Old Bao.
In one of the villages there was a certain Wang, a student of the Imperial College, who was in love with the wife of one of his tenant farmers; the two were well suited, and being annoyed that the husband was at home, Wang bribed a fortune-teller to tell the man that his year was unlucky for staying at home and that he must travel far afield if he were to escape harm. The husband believed it. He went and told Wang, and Wang lent him capital and sent him to trade in Sichuan.
Three years went by and he did not come back, and the village passed the word around that the tenant had been murdered by Wang.
Song had heard something of this, and wanted to right the wrong. One day, passing through the village, a whirlwind rose in front of his sedan chair. He followed where it went, and it came out of a well. He had runners dredge the well, and a man’s decayed body was brought up, which he took to be the missing tenant. So he arrested Wang and the tenant’s wife, and had them interrogated under severe torture. Both confessed to having murdered the husband, and were dealt with according to law.
The people of the district called him Judge Bao. They made a play of it and sang it from village to village.
A year later the husband came back from Sichuan. He had no sooner entered the town than he saw the affair of Wang being acted on a stage. He stood and watched it, and learned that his wife had already died for a crime that was not hers.
He broke down on the spot, and carried his outcry to the provincial capital. The surveillance commissioner tried the case, and Magistrate Song answered for it with his life, under the statute on causing death by deliberately torturing the innocent.
And the people of Xianyou made a song about it:
Talked of a lover murdering a husband — and the true Dragon Diagram became the false. A word to all who are set over the people in this world: do not lean on clean hands and think that makes you bold.
