He took his seat in the hall at the proper hour, dealt with the whole run of business before him, and then gave orders for the plaint board to be carried out.

放告牌 — the plaint board. A prefecture did not hear complaints at any hour a citizen chose. On appointed days the court would carry a board out to the gate announcing that the magistrate was now receiving petitions, and anyone with a case could come forward. It was, in effect, the office opening for the public. 一應事務 — the whole run of business. The prefect clears his routine docket first and only then opens the doors. The book is showing us a properly ordered court, one working item at a time, which is the setting for everything that follows.

Kou Liang and his brother came in clutching the board, fell to their knees and cried out, "Your honour! We humbly bring a charge of robbery with theft of goods, and of wounding and murder — a matter of the gravest kind."

爺爺 is what a commoner called a magistrate to his face — literally grandfather, but functioning as your honour. The doubled word loses its second beat entirely in speech, which is why it sounds like one long word rather than two short ones. 小的們 — we little ones — is the matching self-abasement. The whole exchange is conducted in a fixed vocabulary of rank that both sides know by heart. 重情, a grave matter, is court language for a capital case. The brothers are not merely reporting a burglary; the first words out of their mouths ask for a hanging.

The prefect took up the complaint and read it through — this and that, so and so — and asked at once, "Word came to me yesterday that your house had completed its vow of feeding monks, and that you had fed four eminent monks besides, arhats from the Tang court in the east; and that you saw them off with drums and music the whole length of the street, in a great gaudy show. How then does this business come about?"

The prefect's first move is to notice the contradiction, and it is exactly the right question. Yesterday these men were parading the monks through town as holy guests. Today they want them hanged. He asks how both things can be true. 鼓樂 — drums and music. The second character is the one for music, which is written the same way as the everyday word for joy and sounds nothing like it. Chapter 96 reads it that way at both of its own occurrences, and this is the same procession being described. 花撲撲的 again — the widow's contemptuous word for her family's own parade, now coming back at her sons out of the magistrate's mouth. He is quoting the town's gossip, and the town found it showy too.