The characters — Sun Wukong

I The investigator

Ink painting on silk: a slight scribe in dark navy robes sits at a plain desk, brush in hand over an open book, a small lamp burning beside him and shelves of scrolls fading into mist.

Celestial Scribe Sixth Class · four hundred years in the Archive

Wei Mingzhen

Slight and precise, with the finest hand in his department and the filing system every new scribe is trained on. He sleeps two hours in every twelve, and a gap in a document registers in him as a tightness behind the sternum. He is handed three pages of official summary, forty days, and the Comprehensive Account of the Havoc in Heaven.

“observing without desiring to change what is observed”
Senior Scrivener Bo Yunshan, in Wei's appointment entry · Chapter 2

Appears in every room, from the door to the filing

II The Court

Ink painting on silk: a court official in a black winged hat sits upright behind a desk stacked with bound files; a single brush stroke hangs on the wall behind him.

Senior Scrivener · Wei’s superior

Hong Jingbao

He hands Wei the commission and approves every formally correct request that follows, keeping his silences so they can be read either way. His position lets him hear some words and not others. In his office the subject of the investigation is never named.

“Be a careful one, Wei.”
Senior Scrivener Hong Jingbao · Chapter 28

Appears the commission, the filing

Ink painting on silk: a silver-haired minister in red and gold dragon robes sits very straight at an empty lacquered desk with one cup of tea.

Chancellor · first minister of the Jade Emperor · eight hundred years old

Yuan Taidao

The most capable administrator in the celestial bureaucracy. He designed the Court’s first answer to the Monkey King, a stable-keeper’s post with no grade at all, and then its second: the title Great Sage Equal to Heaven in one column of the registry, and a rank that did not match it in another.

“You are an honest scribe. I am asking you to be a loyal one.”
Chancellor Yuan Taidao · Chapter 27

Appears the archive

III The witnesses

Every witness is accurate. No two of them saw the same event.

Ink painting on silk: a weathered commander in dark lacquered armour laced with red cords holds a folded dispatch against a smoky red sky.

Commander · senior surviving officer of the armies sent against him

Pine Branch

Twelve divisions in three waves could not touch the subject. Pine Branch’s dispatches from the engagement are the most honest documents in the file: under pressure the formal register slipped, and three sentences dropped the passive voice.

“He stopped himself. That is the only truthful account of how it ended. He stopped. He could have continued. He chose to stop.”
Commander Pine Branch · Chapter 9

Appears the testimony, the filing

Ink painting on silk: a young soldier in dark armour looks down at his raised right hand; a dark storm cloud hangs still behind him.

A young soldier of the Northern Ward · the first witness

Li Wen

Trained in the Court’s restraint templates, he found that none of them made contact. His hand has trembled since. The three officers questioned that week each saw something else: Lieutenant Huang Shih a binding rain sent back on the men who made it, Sub-Lieutenant Meng Li a sound made by a shape with nothing physical behind it, Second Lieutenant Zhao Heshan a space in his memory where the seeing had been.

“weather that looked at us”
Li Wen, boxed by Wei · Chapter 11

Appears the testimony

Ink painting on silk: an older guard in armour stands at his post in a colonnade of red pillars, halberd upright, in warm golden light.

Sergeant of the Palace Guard · six hundred years at his post

Fang Lieyang

He watched from the outer colonnade of the Treasure Hall, three hundred yards off, for about four hours. From there he saw the shape rather than the detail: formations that entered the courtyard as armies and left it as soldiers, and the Court’s administered light moving with the subject.

“It became interested.”
Sergeant Fang Lieyang, of the light in the courtyard · Chapter 11

Appears the testimony

Ink painting on silk: a young records officer in grey-green robes holds a portfolio to her chest in front of shelves of jade and crystal pill jars.

Records officer · Bureau of Immortal Medicine

Qian Yuwei

She was at the records desk when the subject appeared in the storage chamber without passing a checkpoint. He ate all five hundred and twenty-two pills in ascending order of potency, an order written down only in another building. She timed him: one every four and a half seconds. When he had finished he complimented the arrangement.

“I did the thing my training equipped me to do. I recorded.”
Records Officer Qian Yuwei · Chapter 12

Appears the testimony

Ink painting on silk: a quiet stable keeper stands among white horses whose heads are turned toward the open stable door.

Keeper of the Celestial Stables · appointed after the subject left the post

Hou Tianyi

He had been told to expect disorder. He found the cleanest stables of his career, and horses that still lift their heads whenever the stable door opens, waiting for someone who is not him.

“The horses disagreed.”
The narrator · Chapter 14

Appears the testimony

Ink painting on silk: a woman in plain robes sits weeping at the foot of an enormous old peach tree whose branches are bare.

Head Keeper of the Peach Garden · four thousand years

Lady Tianmu

She knows every branch of every tree by its character, not its catalogue number. Her testimony turns the whole account: he did not wreck the garden, he ate the ripe fruit off the branch, knowing which was ready. She has wept at the foot of the oldest tree ever since.

“he was not trying to destroy; he was eating”
Lady Tianmu · Chapter 9

Appears the journey, the filing

IV Beyond the map

Bodhisattva · Potalaka, on the southern ocean

Guanyin

She answers Wei’s request for an interview with one word on one sheet, sealed in deep jade. In an open pavilion above the jade water he puts his brush down, and she tells him the difference between ranking a being and recognizing one.

“The distinction is: ranking says you are this much. Recognition says you are.”
Guanyin · Chapter 22

Appears the journey

Ink painting on silk: a thin monk in plain cotton robes, holding a clay bowl, walks along a mountain road.

Chen Xuanzang, a mortal monk from the Tang lands · thirty years old

Tang Sanzang

Five hundred years after the investigation he walks west for the scriptures, in cotton robes and straw sandals, and stops beneath the seal on Five Elements Mountain. The being who comes out of the stone will carry him across a river on his back.

“He was the most fragile thing in the cosmos, and he was walking west.”
The narrator · Chapter 30

Appears the western road

V The subject

Ink painting on silk: a dark door stands a little open; in the red-gold courtyard beyond, a small blurred shape that cannot be made out.

The Great Sage Equal to Heaven · born from stone on Flower-Fruit Mountain

Sun Wukong

No likeness on file. Every witness saw a different event, and the novel never shows him whole: two seconds through a gap in a door, a voice through the stone of a seal, a look across a river from the bamboo. This site keeps to the same rule.

“he wanted to be what he was”
The narrator · Chapter 5

Glimpsed through the door, through the stone, across the river

Also in the file

Senior Scrivener Bo Yunshan: Recommended Wei for archival duty four hundred years ago, and described what he saw in him.
The Jade Emperor: Told of the light from the stone by his Thousand-Li Eye and Wind-Accompanying Ear. The Court is his.
The Buddha: The resolution from outside the Court’s authority: a wager in the palm of his hand, and five hundred years under a mountain.
Shancai: The young attendant who waits at the waterline on Potalaka and leads Wei up the steps without a word.
The Patriarch Subodhi: The teacher across the ocean who named him Sun Wukong, “Awakened to Emptiness”.
Ao Guang, Dragon King of the Eastern Sea: Whose treasury held the iron pillar that glowed when he walked in, and who filed the first complaint.
The Ten Kings of the Underworld: Keepers of the Registry of Life and Death, where he crossed out his own name and filed the second complaint.
Laozi: Whose refined pills of immortality the Bureau of Immortal Medicine kept on three shelves.

Most of these people are the novel’s own. Some come from Journey to the West, the classic it retells.

What the book keeps, and what it changes Read Part One free

Who is in the file

I The investigator

Wei Mingzhen

II The Court

Hong Jingbao

Yuan Taidao

III The witnesses

Pine Branch

Li Wen

Fang Lieyang

Qian Yuwei

Hou Tianyi

Lady Tianmu

IV Beyond the map

Guanyin

Tang Sanzang

V The subject

Sun Wukong

Also in the file