At the beginning of the dynasty, when Lord Yao Duanke of Tongcheng was Minister of Justice, a certain man of Shanxi was about to be convicted in a case of murder.
The man bribed the lord’s younger brother Wenyan with a hundred thousand in gold, asking to be spared. Wenyan agreed, but feared the lord’s uprightness, and dared not put it to him; he hoped that the man would be let off, and meant to take the money privately.
One evening the lord was judging cases under the lamp, when of a sudden a man came down from the rafters with a dagger in his hand.
“Are you an assassin?” the lord asked. “What have you come for?”
“I have come for the man of Shanxi.”
The lord said: “That man ought not by law to be spared. If he is to be spared, then the law of the state is ruined, and I shall have no face to stand in the court. Better to die.” And he pointed at his own neck. “Take it.”
The visitor said: “You must not. But why did your brother take the money?”
“I did not know.”
“I had judged that you did not know,” said the visitor.
He sprang out, and there was only the sound on the roof tiles of wind sweeping leaves.
At that time Wenyan had just left the capital to take up a prefectural post. The lord hurriedly sent someone to warn him. At Dezhou he had already lost his head in the carriage.
According to his servants: “The master finished his breakfast at the inn, got into the carriage and went a few li, and then suddenly shouted, ‘What a cold wind!’ We hurried up with wadded clothes to look, and his head was gone, and there was nothing but blood.”
Duanke wrote these lines on the White Cloud Pavilion of the Ministry of Justice:
I always feel my breast full of the will to live; one must know that the world has many bitter people.
