The Brocade Physician-Guard

The Brocade Physician-Guard is a long historical time-travel novel by the web author Mao Tiao, serialized on Qidian.com from May 16, 2011, and completed on June 14, 2013, running to about 3,707,600 characters. The protagonist, Qin Lin, is a seasoned forensic pathologist and criminal investigator in the modern world; an accident sends him back to the Wanli era of the Ming dynasty. Newly arrived in Qizhou in Jinghu, he lacks household registration documents (a travel permit) and is restricted at every turn; chance draws him into the fortunes of Li Shizhen's household, and the great physician takes him as a disciple, where he comes to know Li Shizhen's granddaughter Li Qingdai and the rest of the school. He had meant to rely on his medical skill to make a living and become a renowned physician who heals the world, but again and again, while assisting local authorities in examining corpses and determining causes of death, he reveals his talents, and eventually puts on the flying-fish robe of the Embroidered Uniform Guard, making forensic examination, trace analysis, and logical deduction his foundation as he solves one perplexing case after another. As the stage shifts from Jinghu to Jiangnan, from the capital to the northern deserts, and then to the seas and the South Seas, Qin Lin moves among historical figures such as Zhang Juzheng, Qi Jiguang, Xu Wei, and the Wanli Emperor, healing with medicine and judging with criminal law, gradually rising from a minor clerk to the court and being drawn into the great currents of court politics, border troubles, and maritime trade. The whole book takes as its main line "a forensic expert returned to the Ming, wielding the Embroidered Uniform Guard, solving cases and hunting criminals, judging the living and the dead," blending criminal investigation, medicine, power politics, and street life; the prose is witty and brisk, the pace quick, and it is one of the representative works of the Ming-dynasty forensic case-solving genre.