The Authentic Orthography
Judgment, Underworld, Order · The Judge of the Dead
Unicode restoration and ASCII comparison
Yánluó
The name survives only in scholarly transliteration. Yánluó is the standard Chinese romanisation, documented in academic sources — “'King Yan' (閻羅, from Yama), the judge of the dead”. Its acute stress marks preserve distinctions lost in plain ASCII.
The original script for this chinese name has not yet been added to PUNICODEX. The form shown is a scholarly transliteration.
yanluo
Reduced to plain yanluo, the name loses everything that made it specific: acute stress marks. What remains is an ASCII string that machines can parse but that no longer speaks with its original voice.
Yánluó
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII flattened. Yánluó restores acute stress marks, returning the name to its original written dignity. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
Yánluó.com → xn--ynlu-5na5i.com
The non-ASCII characters in Yánluó are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Yánluó.
How Yánluó is preserved in writing
A bespoke provenance study for Yánluó is being prepared by the PUNICODEX scholarly team.
Contribute scholarly provenance →How Yánluó was spoken
The Ten Courts, the Record Books, and the Mirror of Deeds
Yánluó is the magistrate at the centre of the Chinese afterlife: the Indian god Yama enthroned in a Chinese courtroom, judging the dead from their own record books. Before him, the myth insists, wealth and rank are nothing — the only evidence is what you did.
The registers of life and death: every deed entered, nothing argued away.
The karma-mirror that shows each soul its own actions — the courtroom's only witness.
Dìyù's bureaucracy: ten tribunals, his the fifth and most feared.
He holds the book of allotted years — the deadline no bribe extends.
Stories of Yánluó
Yánluó's mythology is procedural: not adventures but cases. His stories are judgments — and the judgments are always, the texts insist, simply the soul's own deeds read back to it.
Before he was a king of hell he was the first man to die: the Ṛgveda's Yama chose mortality, found the road to the other world, and became the guide and host of the fathers — honoured with songs and offerings. Buddhism inherited him as the dharma-king who interrogates the dead: the three messengers — old age, sickness, death — are his summonses, sent to every house.
The Chinese Ten Kings system, formed by the Tang, stations Yánluó in the fifth court — the great reckoning after the first four screenings. There the record books are opened, the mirror of deeds is raised, and the verdict is assigned: paradise, rebirth, or the numbered hells. One legend says he once held the first court but was demoted for leniency — even the king of the dead is audited.
Chinese folklore kept electing incorruptible mortals to his office: the Song-dynasty judge Bao Zheng — "Justice Bao" of a hundred operas — was said to judge the living by day and the dead by night as Yánluó's incarnation. The identification is the myth's message: the perfect magistrate is already doing the underworld's work, and the underworld is only the courtroom made honest.
Yánluó is the god of the life review. His court invents nothing and forgives nothing; it only reads — and the terror and the comfort are the same: the record is exact. He asks the question his mirror has posed for two thousand years: if the book of your deeds were opened tonight, would you need a lawyer — or only a witness?
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