Grand Coordinator Yu Chenglong, on a tour of inspection, arrived at Gaoyou. It so happened that a great gentry family was about to marry off a daughter, and one night her richly stocked trousseau was carried off wholesale by burglars who had tunneled through the wall. The prefect was at his wits' end. Lord Yu ordered every city gate shut except one, through which travelers could come and go, and posted a gate warden there to search all baggage and loads thoroughly. He also put up notices ordering every household in the city to stay at home and await a door-to-door inspection and search the next day, until the stolen goods were found. Then he quietly told the warden: if anyone passes through the gate more than once, seize him. By afternoon two men had been caught, carrying nothing at all but the clothes they stood in. "These are the real thieves," said Lord Yu. The two kept protesting their innocence. He had them stripped and searched, and under their robes they were wearing two sets of women's clothing, all of it from the trousseau chests. Fearing the great search the next day, they had been desperate to move the goods; but there was too much to carry, so they had been secretly wearing it out, trip after trip.
Another time, when Lord Yu was still a county magistrate, he traveled to a neighboring county. Early one morning, passing outside the city wall, he saw two men carrying a sick person on a bed, covered with a big quilt. Hair showed on the pillow, with a phoenix hairpin stuck in it, and the figure lay on its side. Three or four strapping men walked alongside, taking turns tucking the quilt in with their hands and pressing it under the body, as though afraid of a draft. After a little while they set the bed down by the roadside to rest, and then two others took over the carrying. Once he had passed them, Lord Yu sent a runner back to ask about it; they said it was their younger sister, close to death, being taken back to her husband's family. After going two or three li further, Lord Yu sent the runner back again to see which village they entered. The runner trailed them to a farmhouse, where two men came out to meet them and took them inside. He returned and reported to Lord Yu. Lord Yu asked the local magistrate, "Has there been a robbery in the city?" "None," said the magistrate. In those days the regulations were strict, and officials high and low hushed up banditry, so even when people were robbed and murdered they swallowed it and dared not speak.
Lord Yu went to his lodgings and told his servants to make careful inquiries, and sure enough, bandits had broken into a rich family's house and tortured the master to death with red-hot irons. Lord Yu summoned the son and questioned him about it, but the son flatly denied it. "I have already caught the robbers for you," Lord Yu said. "I mean nothing else by it." At that the son kowtowed, weeping, and begged him to avenge the dead. Lord Yu knocked at the magistrate's gate and had him send his toughest runners out of the city at the fourth watch. They went straight to the farmhouse and arrested eight men, who confessed at the first interrogation. Asked who the "sick woman" was, the robbers testified: "That night we were all at a brothel, so we arranged it with a prostitute: we put the gold on the bed and had her lie there hugging it, and when we reached our hideout we split it up." Everyone marveled at Lord Yu's uncanny insight. Someone asked how he had known. "It's easy to see," he said. "People just don't pay attention. What young wife lying in bed would let men put their hands under her quilt? And they kept switching shoulders as they went, so the load was clearly very heavy; and with them reaching in to guard it from both sides, I knew there had to be something inside. Besides, if a sick woman were brought home half-conscious, there would surely be women at the door to meet her; but only men came out, and not one of them asked a startled question. That's how I knew for certain they were robbers."
