Did China create the world’s first Sherlock Holmes? A Russian reader thinks so

Many of you in Hong Kong would call Chief Inspector Chen Cao, in Death of a Red Heroine  by Qiu Xiaolong, a “Chinese Sherlock Holmes” – but how would you react to a Russian in Moscow calling the original Mr Holmes a British Vice Censor Yu Chenglong? Let me elaborate.

I grew up in the ’70s in Siberia and the only book translated from Chinese I could find was Strange Tales from Liaozhai by Pu Songling. Two tales in it about that vice censor might have read like a pastiche Sherlock Holmes story, had I not discovered that their author died long before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born.

Of course it was a drop in the bucket for someone who wanted to learn your language. And we in Russia must have been then, as now, preparing for a war with the US and thus learning English. As a result, I could understand only the BBC’s short-wave programmes in English broadcast from – incidentally – Hong Kong. As I remain an avid listener, I discovered Death of a Red Heroine, dramatised by BBC Radio 4 in 2015.

But each time I hear that the very first detective novel was The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins published in the UK in 1868, I want to protest that it was actually Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from Liaozhai, published in China in 1740.

Mergen Mongush, Moscow