Du Qiping — Prototype

The character of Uncle Du, the coffin-maker, is rooted in a case involving the disposal of a body at a school construction site. A maintenance worker at an educational institution was implicated in the concealment of human remains within the structure of a building undergoing renovation. The remains had been placed during construction; the precise circumstances of the death were disputed throughout the subsequent investigation. The maintenance worker, when eventually located and questioned, claimed to have been acting under instruction from a superior and to have been under the impression the death was accidental. This claim could not be fully verified or refuted.

What the case established — and what the character of Uncle Du embodies — is the figure of the subordinate who executes a disposal without fully confronting what he is disposing of. The institutional environment produces people who learn not to ask. The person who builds the enclosure, pours the concrete, or in this novel's framing builds the coffin and carries it to the location, does not necessarily understand himself as a participant in a crime. He understands himself as a person doing a job he was asked to do by someone above him, in a context where asking questions about the job was not encouraged.

The real worker in the referenced case received a lighter sentence than his superior. Whether this reflects proportional culpability or a prosecutorial strategy is a matter on which reasonable people disagreed.