The Red Qipao

The Red Qipao is a detective novel in Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen series, written by the Chinese American author and translated into Chinese by Lu Chuangchuang. Set in mid-1990s Shanghai, the story follows a string of murders of young women: after killing them, the murderer dresses each victim in a torn, old-fashioned red qipao and abandons the bodies in crowded public places — the entrance of the conservatory, the newspaper boards in People's Park. Within weeks, bodies are reported every Friday morning, the police make no progress, and even an undercover policewoman involved in the investigation is killed in the same manner.\n\nInspector Chen Chao of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, however, seems in no hurry: while assigned to a real-estate case in the "West Nine District" involving corruption and violent demolition, he is also rushing to finish a paper on marriage and love for his master's in classical literature, and he mysteriously disappears for a few days. He believes solving a case sometimes follows the same logic as writing a paper: starting from the killer's contradictory behavior — murdering without assaulting, yet insisting on dressing the victims in elegant, torn qipao — he analyzes the killer's psychological structure through literary criticism, Freudian psychology, and Confucian and Buddhist thought; his paper's reflections on the Chinese collective unconscious and archetypes also provide clues. As the investigation deepens, the murders gradually draw out memories of an earlier era, and the red qipao is both a symbol of old Shanghai and a key to understanding the fates of its characters amid changing times.\n\nThe plot advances layer by layer, and Chen Chao ultimately follows the clues to identify the killer and prompt a confession, with an ending that carries considerable resonance. Combining classic puzzle-plot detection with social observation, it is a representative work for understanding Qiu Xiaolong's "poet inspector."