”Today is the day I will be murdered…”
With these mysterious opening words written down in Chinese calligraphy, the game Murders on the Yangtze River begins. Set during the end of the Qing Dynasty, the protagonist John Shen is a detective travelling along the Yangtze River to solve murder mysteries, while also investigating his brother’s death.
In this game, players can investigate the scene, collect clues, interview witnesses and examine their testimony. The characters and cases in the game are fiction, but they are based on real historical contexts. There are also some “history fact cards” which pop up in the game as the story unfolds to help you learn more.
At first, I thought it was just another archetypal detective story in a Chinese context. It turns out to be a bitter time capsule that contains ink, rust, burning opium, and blood that brings us back to the painful days when the West dominated Chinese lands.
Ink
Can you imagine an education system based entirely on constant examinations based on classical Confucian texts? That was reality for many Chinese men who depended on the system to get jobs as government officials, which were considered the most honourable profession.
Suddenly, the foreigners forced China open with weapons they have never seen before. The “Western technologies” became more important to learn. Despite attempts to add new exam content, the 1,300 year old civil service exam failed to prepare Qing officials for Western intervention.
A witness in the game, Mr Zhou spends almost his whole life preparing and taking the exams, hoping his name will one day appear on the “golden list”, allowing him to work as a rich and powerful government official. When the outdated system was abolished in 1905, people like Mr Zhou suddenly lost their hope of getting all they ever wanted.Lucky for him, a kind soldier still puts the “golden list” on the wall every year, only for Mr Zhou to see.
Rust and burning opium
In the story, John has a childhood nightmare. After getting addicted to opium, his father becomes a demon, selling all his assets, and even his own son, for opium. “I’ve raised you up, it’s time to pay back!”, yells the father, changing into a big monster whose head occupies nearly half of the screen, chasing John as a child and trying to devour him.
There were around eight million drug addicts in China during the late Qing period, which means thousands of families suffered while millions of tonnes of Chinese silver flowed into Western coffers.
John’s elder brother, Brian, tries to put this to an end. He abandons his childhood detective dream, and instead dedicates himself to study potential cures to drug addiction. He dies mysteriously.
Similarly, the character David Ding devotes himself to improving steel refining methods for railways, so that his factory doesn’t have to import expensive coal from other countries. He has no chemistry degree, no sophisticated chemical lab, yet he says he finally made it. He dies too.
Facing the war, suffering from the sudden changes of their lives, many Chinese people try to escape into the opium world, only to put themselves in a more difficult position. In the meantime, people like Brian Shen and David Ding risk everything to study technology under extremely difficult circumstances, to fight against the colonial power.
Blood
In the last case, John is accused of murder, and his assistant Frankie represents him at the court. But wait — why are there two judges? Behind them, there’s a flag that says: “SHANGHAI MUNICIPALITY”, which contains 12 countries’ flags: the UK, the US, France, Germany, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Austria, Spain and Holland. China was treated by these Western powers as if it was a cake — each nation took a slice.
Due to Western influence, the legal system in Shanghai utilised both Chinese and foreign officials. For cases regarding Chinese people living in the international settlements, the Chinese official should make decisions with the “help” of another foreign official.
The Chinese official in the game mentions a real case: a woman named Li Huang Shi and her servants were arrested for trafficking. The Chinese official found out the woman was innocent, and ordered to release them, but the UK official forced them back to jail. This triggered thousands of Chinese people’s anger. They protested, even if the policemen shot and killed some of them.
“All contact leaves traces. The evidence is not non-existent, but instead undiscovered.” When John tries to find another clue in his memory, he always says these words.
China’s colonial history seems to be gone, but it also leaves traces. It remains as a scar in our hearts, and when we are playing a historical game like Murders on the Yangtze River, the scar throbs to remind us: we never forget, the world never forgets.
Games are like time capsules: they present the historical landscape in detail, immersively and creatively, to educate us about the past and present.
According to the developer, the full English version of the game will be released in March.
