30: T'ang-yin-pi-shih: Parallel Cases from under the Pear-Tree

"A 13th Century Manual of Jurisprudence and Detection, translated from the original chinese with an introduction and notes by R.H. van Gulik."

So yeah.

This is the case book that inspired van Gulik's first few Judge Dee novels and several of these cases are easily recognised in those novels. The cases are all brief sketches of a paragraph. Most of the notes are on textual differences between sources, but one of the introductory essays, on court procedure in ancient china, is pretty good.

Only worth the bother if you're studying ancient Chinese jurisprudence, or are a complete van Gulik nut. I easily qualify in the second category.