A Judge Dee Detective Story- Murder In Canton

In the seventh century A.D. the two leading world powers were the vast Chinese T'ang Empire in the east, and in the west the Islamic realm of the Arab Khalifs, who had conquered the entire Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe. Curiously enough, though, these two cultural and military giants barely knew of each other's existence; the points of contact of their spheres of influence were limited to a few scattered trade-centres. In the latter hardy Chinese and Arab sea captains met, but in their re¬spective home-countries their accounts of the marvels they had seen were dismissed as so many sailors' yarns. Since for this Judge Dee novel I wanted to place the judge in an entirely new milieu, I laid the scene of my story in Canton, the port-city which was one of the focal points of contact between the Chinese and Arab worlds.