In the childhood of each of us, I believe that it is inseparable from Detective Di Renjie. The two figures of Di Renjie and Bao Zheng are the Chinese version of "Sherlock Holmes". Detective novels are actually not popular in China, but on the contrary, the West loves such themes. How did Di Renjie, as the prime minister of the Tang Dynasty, become a famous detective in the minds of Chinese? Let's take a look.
Di Renjie was a native of Shanxi, born in ancient Taiyuan to a family of eunuchs, his grandfather was the prime minister of the Zhenguan period, a high-ranking and powerful position, and his father was also a dynasty official. And he embarked on his career through the imperial examination, and at first he became a local official, because of his upright personality, he offended many people. But fortunately, there were noble people to help him along the way, so he was appointed as a central official at the age of nearly 50, Dali Cheng.
He worked conscientiously and rigorously, everything was based on Tang law, and even if the emperor made mistakes, he dared to speak out and point out the inappropriateness of the emperor's approach. After Emperor Gaozong noticed him, he admired his ability, so he promoted him to "Shi Yushi", this official was actually the same level as Dali Cheng, but the promotion speed was the fastest among the central institutions, which helped his career a lot, so at this time, Emperor Gaozong had actually put him in the key training object.
The duty of the imperial attendant was also to hear cases, but the object of the trial changed, from the common people directly to the hundred officials of the dynasty. When he first took office as Dali Cheng, he dealt with the backlog of cases day and night within a year, and for a time, his reputation rose. After serving the imperial history, he strictly investigated the lawbreakers and successively pulled down two of the emperor's favored subjects, of course, this was indispensable to The support and love of Emperor Gaozong.
During the Gaozong period, Di Renjie's office in various places was mainly based on judgment, much like the image of Di Renjie in later TV dramas. Because of his character traits of being upright and fearless of the powerful, there are many novels in the world and in later generations that describe his clear judgment, but due to China's special national conditions, such novels are not popular.
This was later changed by a Dutchman named Gaulope, whose father was a medic in the East Indian Army at the time. After graduating from university, he became a diplomat and was active in Southeast Asia and China. He is a veritable Chinese pundit, not only speaking fluent Chinese, but also very interested in Chinese culture. Around the 1940s, he stumbled upon the novel "The Case of the Four Great Dukes of Wu Zetian" and was immediately impressed by the wisdom of the case. The protagonist of the book is Di Renjie, so he immediately searched for other novels of the same type, and compared with the detective novels that prevailed in the West, he found that the methods of case determination used by Chinese detectives were no less than those of Western novels in terms of logic, interrogation, and criminal psychology.
Therefore, he had a great idea, collecting and sorting out folk detective novels, translating them and compiling them into volumes, and at the same time he also created his own English detective novels featuring Di Renjie, which he did not expect to be a great success after being published in Europe. Since then, he has written more than 20 public case novels, all of which have become bestsellers. Later, in the 1980s, the novels were translated into Chinese and returned to China.