The Phantom of the Temple is a gong'an detective novel written by Robert van Gulik and set in Imperial China (roughly speaking the Tang dynasty).

It is a fiction based on the real character of Judge Dee (Ti Jen-chieh or Di Renjie), a magistrate and statesman of the Tang court, who lived roughly 630–700.

Judge Dee, a magistrate in the fictional Lan-fang district has a problem: a mysterious phantom is haunting a Buddhist temple.

"It is regrettable that this latecomer to detection should have died suddenly and at a relatively early age, but this next-to-last product of his pen suggests that the quite original formula he popularized is exhausted.

The concealment of robbery by faked supernatural doings is old hat, and the events that Judge Dee unravels here are too cluttered to be either attractive or puzzling".