The lacquer screen

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Chinese: 狄公案; pinyin: Dí Gōng Àn; lit. "Cases of Judge Dee"), also known as Di Gong An or Dee Goong An, is an 18th-century Chinese gong'an detective novel by an anonymous author, "Buti zhuanren" (Chinese: 不题撰人). It is loosely based on the stories of Di Renjie (Wade-Giles Ti Jen-chieh), a county magistrate and statesman of the Tang court, who lived roughly 630–700. Though set in Tang dynasty China, the novel also contains cultural elements from later dynasties. A translated version was released by Robert van Gulik in 1949; van Gulik would go on to write his own series of Judge Dee novels, starting with The Chinese Maze Murders.