The Haunted Monastery.  This second novelof the New Judge Dee
Series I wrote in Beyrouth,from 22 Nov. 1958,till the middle of
January 1959,and it was published without  material changes in
the text.The main plot of this story was suggested to me by the
famous Taoist monastery of the White Clouds (Po-yün-Kuan),in
Peking.I had known the abbot An Shih-1in quite well;he was an
expert lute player,and a fine scholar,and I often attended lite-
rary and musical meetings in the monastery,in the old Peking
days. Later,however,it was discovered that the abbot had illicit
relations with young girls,and his own indignant monks buried
him alive,in 1947. In this novel I found I could make do with
only 12 characters,Judge Dee being accompanied only by his lieu-
tenant Tao Gan.