In the Han dynasty there was a young widow in Donghai who served her mother-in-law with scrupulous devotion.
The old woman said: “You have worked yourself thin for me. I am old. Why should I grudge my remaining years, and go on being a burden to someone young?” And she hanged herself.
Her own daughter then went to the magistrate and said: “My mother has been murdered. It was the wife.”
They arrested the widow. They tortured her. She could not bear it, and confessed to a killing she had not done.
There was a clerk in that prison named Yu, and he said to anyone who would listen: “This woman served her mother-in-law for more than ten years and was known through the province for her filial piety. She did not kill anybody.”
The governor would not hear it. Yu argued and lost, and then he did the only thing left to him: he gathered up the instruments of the case, the record and the torture-tools, and walked out of the yamen weeping.
They executed her.
And at the execution her blood — which should have run down the block and into the earth — ran upward, up the length of the pole the banner hung from, and the crowd saw it.
After that, the commandery dried up. For three years, no rain.
A new governor came, and Yu said to him: “That woman should not have died. The governor before you killed her wrongly, and the blame for this drought is here.”
The new governor went himself to her grave and made offering there, and had the tomb marked and recorded. And the sky opened that day, and it rained, and the harvest that year was abundant.
The story is two hundred characters long and it is the root of half of Chinese drama. The Yuan playwright Guan Hanqing took it and made it into The Injustice to Dou E, in which the dying girl makes three vows — that her blood will fly upward onto the white silk, that snow will fall in midsummer, and that the province will suffer three years of drought — and every one of them comes true.
What survives from Gan Bao’s version, and what makes it unbearable, is not the miracle. It is the clerk. Yu knew. Yu said so. Yu was overruled, and Yu gathered up the file and wept in the street — and the universe, which in this tradition keeps accounts even when courts do not, stopped the rain until someone in authority admitted it.