Accounts of his life were recorded in historical documents that later inspired the mythological Judge Bao of gong'an fiction.

[2] The Circle of Chalk (Chinese:灰闌記) is a Yuan zaju play that recounts a Judge Bao criminal case.

The popularity of Judge Bao performances contributed to the success of written gong'an novels published in the 16th and 17th centuries.

[5] Qing Judge Bao stories were widespread in every medium, from operas to folk performances and novels.

[2] In the 1940s, Di Gong An (Chinese:狄公案), an 18th-century collection of gong'an stories, was discovered at a second-hand book store in Tokyo, Japan and translated into English as the Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee by Dutch sinologist Robert Van Gulik in 1949.

[6] Van Gulik chose Di Gong An to translate because it was in his view closer to the Western tradition of detective fiction and more likely to appeal to non-Chinese readers.

He used the style and characters to write a long running series of Judge Dee books that introduced the gong'an genre to Western audiences as the "Sherlock Holmes of China".

Wuxia writer Jin Yong's novels portray more elaborate martial arts and weapons than that of earlier gong'an works.

The Gong'an fiction is a collection of seemingly unrelated short stories, however, they are connected based on their common tropes or crime-related conventions.

This is clearly seen in one of Zheng Zhenduo's illustrations, wherein the act of butchering animals is dramatically shown to lead straight to the gates of hell at left by means of a cloud-like cartouche.

[18]Gong'an fiction is part of a broader category of crime-themed fiction, which includes a variety of true crime stories, like those found in the late Ming dynasty story collection The Book of Swindles[19] or in the type of legal case narratives anthologized in Robert E. Hegel's True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China (2009).

[7] Based on traditional gong'an fiction works such as Di Gong An and Justice Bao, many television dramas has been derived to portray the stories with a modern touch.