Judge Bao and the Inkstone

The official in the television series that so many Vietnamese families once watched together was a real person.

But the real man had no magic powers, no execution blades like the ones in the stories, and no moon on his forehead. This story is about exactly that difference. When everything later generations added is stripped away, the man left underneath turns out to be even more interesting.

His name was Bao Zheng. He was born in 999 in the Hefei area, and he served as an official under the Song, the dynasty then ruling China. He died in 1062.

Several hundred years after his death, opera troupes and then novelists kept adding to him, a little more in each age. Every generation laid on another layer, until his name carried a whole store of strange tales that history never recorded in a single line. The Song histories tell of him far more quietly. And among those quiet pages there is an inkstone.

But first comes a long stretch of his life when he held no office at all.

Bao Zheng passed the examinations early, and the court gave him a post far away. But his parents were old, so he asked not to go. He was offered a post closer to home, yet the old couple still did not want to leave their village. So he gave up office altogether and went home to care for them. A few years later his parents died, one after the other. He built a hut beside their graves to complete the full mourning. Even after the mourning ended he lingered, unwilling to leave. In the end the village elders came to him several times and urged him to take up the country's work. When he took his first post as a county magistrate, in Tianchang, he was nearly 40 years old.

Then in 1040 he was sent to govern Duanzhou, the area known today as Zhaoqing, in Guangdong.

In those days, the name Duanzhou made anyone who wrote with a brush light up.

Before ballpoint pens, writing meant grinding ink first. A few drops of water went into the hollow of a stone slab. Then a dry ink stick was rubbed round and round until the water thickened into ink. That hollowed stone is called an inkstone. The stone for Duanzhou inkstones came from cliffs beside the river. It was smooth and cool, and however long it was used, it never harmed the brush. It was so fine, people said, that just breathing into the hollow gave enough moisture to grind ink. Inkstone carving there goes back about 1,400 years, to the beginning of the Tang. Together with the brush, the ink stick and paper, the inkstone was one of the four treasures of a scholar's desk in the old days. Any household in the region with someone at their studies knew it by sight. In 2006, the craft of making Duanzhou inkstones was placed in the first group of China's national intangible cultural heritage.

Each year Duanzhou had to send a fixed number of inkstones to the capital. The number was written clearly in the records.

But the officials who governed Duanzhou before Bao Zheng had grown used to doing something else. Using the tribute as an excuse, they made the carvers produce dozens of times the required amount. The surplus never went into the state storehouse. It traveled by a private road to the doors of powerful families in the capital, as gifts.

That surplus did not appear by itself. It lay in the long days of the carvers, bent over the stone, chiseling line by line, polishing layer by layer, for an inkstone whose fate they would never learn.

Bao Zheng arrived, read the records, and gave a very short order. From now on the carvers would make exactly the required number. Not one more.

He governed Duanzhou for three years. In 1043, when his term ended, he left. His baggage held not a single inkstone.

Three years in the very place that made the finest inkstones in the land. Not even one.

On the wall of his office in Duanzhou, he wrote a poem. Its opening line says that a pure heart is the root of governing, and a straight path is the way to plan one's own life. In Zhaoqing today, among the rocky hills of the Seven Star Crags, there is still a carved inscription. It is said to be the only surviving piece of his handwriting. He also had wells dug so the people of the district had water.

Many years later, in 1057, he came to govern Kaifeng, the capital.

There was an old custom there. People with a grievance could not walk straight into the court hall. Every matter had to pass through the clerks before it reached the magistrate. And whatever passes through other hands can move fast or slow, or go astray, depending on who holds it.

Bao Zheng had the main gate opened.

From then on, anyone with a case could walk straight in and stand before the magistrate. They could state their own case, right and wrong, in their own voice, with no one speaking for them. Just one opened gate, and the clerks no longer dared to hide anything.

The histories record that he was straightforward. He hated most of all the officials who were harsh with the people, and he always made those under him behave decently. He hated wrongdoing that much, yet toward people he stayed forgiving. He went along with no one, and he never put on a cheerful face to win anyone over. At home he kept no private letters. When old friends or relatives came asking favors, he turned them all down. Even after he rose to high office, his clothes, his belongings and his meals stayed just as they had been when he was an ordinary man.

The people of the capital had a saying about him that sounds funny at first. They said seeing Bao Zheng smile was harder than seeing the Yellow River run clear. And the Yellow River is muddy all year round. Yet the children and the women of the capital all knew his name by heart.

He also left his descendants an instruction for the family. Any descendant who became an official and took bribes could not come home, and after death could not be buried in the family graveyard. Whoever did not follow this wish was no descendant of his.

Bao Zheng died in 1062. He was 64 by the traditional count. The court gave him the posthumous name Xiaosu.

The official on television came to Vietnamese families by a far more direct road. In 1993, a Taiwanese television company made a series about him. It ran to 236 episodes. It was shown across Asia, including Vietnam, and years later Vietnamese television broadcast it again. A whole generation of parents grew up with it. The name Bao Công, as people in Vietnam call him, has become a phrase in Vietnamese. Anyone who judges fairly, without bending for anyone, is called a Bao Công.

There is one thing no camera ever filmed. After three long years, a traveling chest is closed and carried away from the place that makes the most precious stone in the land. Inside, there is not a single stone.