Even though sometimes it’s referred to as Dali Temple Chronicles, I’ll be using the official English donghua title. One of the reasons is that, well, it’s the official localization (that the manhua doesn’t have), and the other is that “Dali Temple Chronicles” is not very accurate and frankly misleading.

While 寺 can be translated as “temple”, in this case its meaning is closer to “ministry”. 大理寺 actually refers to one of the Tang dynasty government agencies - the Court of Judicial Review. However, that’s quite a mouthful, so in the translations I’ll be mostly using Dali court (the term also used in the official donghua subtitles).

We meet our first protagonist! Chen Shi used to be a farmer and uses pretty informal language, including a dialect variant of “me”. It’s a little difficult to convey the exact feeling in English.

What I translated as “Hu cake” (the way it was in donghua subtitles and frankly the only way it could fit in the speech bubble) is a kind of baked flat wheat cake, often topped with sesame seeds. Very convenient food for traveling, looks like it was brought to China from the western nomadic peoples.