Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Shanghai Jiao Tong University enters the investigation through the identity of Ji Li Rong: she was a second-year student there before disappearing about nine months before the police established a match between her and one of the women recovered at Lujiazui. The university is not depicted as a crime scene; its significance is as a biographical detail that helps make an unidentified victim legible as a particular missing person.

Connection to Ji Li Rong

Detective Qian tells Li Yan that the missing student was known as Moon. Her father had given her that nickname when she was a baby because her face was round like the moon. The detail connects a police identification to a family memory, restoring a private history to someone first encountered in the case through evidence.

Identification and the Case

Ji Li Rong’s bracelet provided a concrete link: Qian confirmed that it belonged to her, and her parents subsequently identified her at the mortuary. Li Yan then presented the bracelet and the identification to Jiang Baofu, establishing that the woman found among those buried at Lujiazui was the Shanghai Jiao Tong University student whose father had called her Moon. Jiang’s attempt to explain the bracelet as something he might have confused with another girl’s was met with Li’s decision to end the interview and charge him with murder.

Narrative Significance

The university’s brief mention anchors Ji Li Rong in an ordinary social identity—student, daughter, and bearer of a family nickname—rather than leaving her as one more body in a collective discovery. That identification also turns an object into a test of Jiang’s account: the bracelet links the recovered woman to her family and exposes the weakness of his explanation. The institution therefore matters through the life and identity it helps locate, not through any action shown on campus.