by Cao Xueqin
Meanwhile Jia She and the consortium were putting up ornamental lanterns everywhere in the gardens and fixing fireworks in place for a pyrotechnic display in honour of the visit. By the fourteenth everything was finally ready. No one in the Jia household, whether master or servant, had a wink of sleep throughout the whole of that night.
By five o’clock next morning, when it was still dark night outside, all those in the family from Grandmother Jia downwards who held any sort of rank or title were already dressed in full court rig. In the Separate Residence
painted phoenix and coiling dragon
flapped and fluttered on drapes and curtains,
gold and silver-work gleamed and glinted,
jewels and gems made a fiery sparkle,
subtle incenses smouldered in brazen censers,
‘everlastings’ blossomed in china vases;
– and all was so silent, that throughout the whole of that great garden not the sound of a cough was to be heard.
Jia She and the other menfolk drew themselves up outside the west gate. Grandmother Jia stood outside the main gate with the female members of the family. They noticed that the ends of the street and the entrances of the side-streets leading into it had all been screened off.
Just as they were beginning to grow impatient, a eunuch trotted up on horseback and was stopped and questioned by Jia Zheng.
‘Oh, you’re much too early yet!’ said the eunuch. ‘Her Grace won’t be taking her lunch until one o’clock; then at two she goes to divine service in the Bao-ling chapel. Five o’clock, when she has an appointment to feast with the Emperor in the Da-ming Palace and look at the New Year lanterns, is the first opportunity she will have of asking permission to leave. I should be surprised if she got started much before seven o’clock this evening I’
‘Well,’ said Xi-feng to Grandmother Jia when she heard this, ‘you and Aunt Wang may as well go back to your room. You will be able to come back later on nearer the time.’
Grandmother Jia and the other ladies took her advice and went off, leaving Xi-feng to attend to whatever still needed doing in the garden. Under her direction some of the stewards carried off the eunuchs and treated them to food and wine, while other servants fetched great bundles of wax candles to illuminate the garden’s many lanterns with.
Suddenly, as afternoon drew towards evening, a clatter of many hooves was heard, and after a short pause, a group of ten or so eunuchs rushed in out of breath, clapping their hands as they ran. This was taken by the other eunuchs as a sign that the Imperial Concubine was on her way, for they at once jumped up and hurried to their prearranged places. The family, too, took up their positions once more, Jia She and the menfolk outside the west gate and Grandmother Jia with the ladies outside the main entrance.
For a long time there was total silence. Then a couple of eunuchs on horseback came riding very, very slowly up to the west gate. Dismounting, they led their horses out of sight behind the cloth screens, then returned to take up their stand at the sides of the road, half-facing towards the west. After a considerable wait, two more eunuchs arrived and went through the same motions as the first pair. Then another two, and then another, until in all some ten pairs were standing at the sides of the road, their faces turned expectantly towards the west.
Presently a faint sound of music was heard and the Imperial Concubine’s procession at last came in sight.
First came several pairs of eunuchs carrying embroidered banners.
Then several more pairs with ceremonial pheasant-feather fans.
Then eunuchs swinging gold-inlaid censers in which special ‘palace incense’ was burning.
Next came a great gold-coloured ‘seven-phoenix’ umbrella of state, hanging from its curve-topped shaft like a great drooping bell-flower. In its shadow was borne the Imperial Concubine’s travelling wardrobe: her head-dress, robe, sash and shoes.
Eunuch gentlemen-in-waiting followed carrying her rosary, her embroidered handkerchief, her spittoon, her fly-whisk, and various other items.
Last of all, when this army of attendants had gone by, a great gold-topped palanquin with phoenixes embroidered on its yellow curtains slowly advanced on the shoulders of eight eunuch bearers.
As Grandmother Jia and the rest dropped to their knees eunuchs rushed up and helped them to get up again. The palanquin passed through the great gate and made for the entrance of a courtyard on the east side of the forecourt. There a eunuch knelt beside it and invited the Imperial Concubine to descend and ‘change her clothes’. The bearers carried it through the entrance and set it down just inside the courtyard. The other eunuchs then withdrew, leaving Yuan-chun’s ladies-in-waiting to help her from the palanquin.
The courtyard she now stepped out into was brilliant with coloured lanterns of silk gauze cunningly fashioned in all sorts of curious and beautiful shapes and patterns. An illuminated sign hung over the entrance of the principal building:
FILLED WITH FAVOURS BATHED IN BLESSINGS
Yuan-chun passed beneath it into the room that had been prepared for her, then, having ‘changed her clothes’, came out again and stepped back into the palanquin, which was now borne into the garden.
Her first impression was a confused one of curling drifts of incense smoke and gleaming colours. There were lanterns everywhere, and soft strains of music. She seemed to be entering a little world wholly dedicated to the pursuit of ease and luxury and delight. Looking at it from the depths of her palanquin she shook her head a little sadly and sighed:
‘Oh dear, this is all so extravagant!’
At that moment a eunuch knelt beside the palanquin and invited the Imperial Concubine to proceed by boat. Stepping out onto the waiting barge she saw an expanse of clear water curving between its banks like a sportive dragon. Lanterns of crystal and glass were fixed to the balustrades which lined the banks, their silvery radiance giving the white marble, in the semi-darkness, the appearance of gleaming drifts of snow. Because of the season, the willows and apricot trees above them were bare and leafless; but in place of leaves they were festooned with hundreds of tiny lanterns, and flowers of gauze, rice-paper and bast had been fastened to the tips of their branches. Other lanterns made of shells and feathers, in the form of lotuses, water-lilies, ducks and egrets floated on the surface of the water below. It would have been hard to say whether the water below or the banks above presented the more brilliant spectacle. Together they combined to make a fairyland of jewelled light. And to these visual delights were added the many charming miniature gardens on the barge itself – not to mention its pearl blinds, embroidered curtains, and the carved and painted oars and paddle with which it was furnished. While Yuan-chun was still admiring all this, her boat approached a landing-stage in a grotto, above which hung a lantern-sign inscribed with these words:
SMARTWEED BANK AND FLOWERY HARBOUR
Stone’s Note to Reader:
You may find it surprising that ‘Smartweed Bank and Flowery Harbour’. ‘The Phoenix Dance’ and those other names, which in the last chapter we showed Bao-yu inventing in an aptitude test imposed at random by his father, should actually have been used on the occasion of the Imperial Concubine’s first visit to her family. Surely, you will say, a household as long established and highly cultivated as the Jias’ must have had several well-known talents at its disposal which it could have called upon for such important purposes as these ? These were no wealthy parvenus whose vulgarity would be satisfied with the effusions of a gifted schoolboy for filling in the gaps where inscriptions are felt to be de rigueur.
The answer lies in Yuan-chun’s special relationship with Bao-yu. Before Yuan-chun entered the Palace, she had been brought up mainly by Grandmother Jia; and when Bao-yu appeared on the scene (at a time when his mother was already middle-aged and unlikely to have any more children) she had lavished all her affection on this little brother who spent all his time with her at their grandmother’s. When he was still a very little boy of only three or four and had not yet be
gun his schooling, she had taught him to recite several texts and to recognize several thousand characters. Although they were brother and sister, their relationship was more like that of a mother and her son; and even after she entered the Palace, she was always writing letters to her father and her male cousins in which she expressed concern for the little boy who was so constantly in her thoughts. ‘I beg you to be most careful in your handling of this child,’ she once wrote. ‘If you are not strict with him, he will never grow up into a proper man. But if you are too strict, you may endanger his health and cause Grandmother to be distressed.’
When, some months previously, Jia Zheng received a favourable report from Bao-yu’s schoolmaster in which his creative ability was commended, he had used the visit to the garden as a means of trying him out. The results were not, of course, what a great writer would have produced in similar circumstances, but at least they were not unworthy of the family’s literary traditions, and Jia Zheng resolved that his daughter should see them, so that she might know that the progress made by her beloved younger brother fully came up to the measure of those ardent hopes she had so often expressed in her letters.
– Incidentally, Bao-yu had, in the intervening time, supplied many more inscriptions for the places they had been unable to cover on that first occasion.
Stone
When Yuan-chun saw the words ‘Smartweed Bank and Flowery Harbour’ she laughed.
‘Surely “Flowery Harbour” is enough by itself? Why “Smartweed Bank” as well?’
At once an attendant eunuch disembarked and rushed like the wind to tell Jia Zheng, who immediately gave orders to have the inscription changed.
By this time the barge had drawn alongside the bank and Yuan-chun disembarked and stepped once more into her palanquin. Soon she was borne into that part of the garden where
‘Roof above roof soared
Eye up-compelling…’
and saw the white marble memorial arch which had so strongly affected Bao-yu when he first saw it. It now bore a temporary inscription:
PRECINCT OF THE CELESTIAL VISITANT
Yuan-chun gave orders that the words ‘The House of Reunion’ should be substituted.
She now ascended the terraces and entered the open-fronted hall of audience.
From a ring of cressets against the night sky
a fragrant scatter dropped on the flagstones;
and candelabra like fiery fir-trees
gleamed festively in the gilded casements;
there were blinds looped and fringed like a prawn’s belly,
there were rugs in rows like an otter’s offering;
and tripods smoked with perfumes of musk and borneol,
and behind the throne waved fans of pheasant feathers.
It was a scene no whit less splendid than that fairy palace of which the poet sings:
The abode of the Princess has cassia halls and orchid chambers.
‘How is it that this place has no name?’ asked Yuan-chun.
‘This is the principal hall of the Residence, Your Grace. The family dared not give it a name without consulting you first.
Her Grace nodded.
A eunuch Master of Ceremonies now requested her to seat herself upon a chair of state in order to receive the obeisances of her family. Music struck up from a band stationed at either side of the steps as two eunuchs conducted Jia She and Jia Zheng onto the terrace beneath. The other male members of the family ranged themselves behind them and the whole party then began to advance in formation up the steps into the hall.
‘Excused!’
A lady-in-waiting came forward and uttered this single word as an indication that the Imperial Concubine wished to absolve them from the ceremonial, and with a slight bow they withdrew.
It was now the turn of Grandmother Jia (‘the Dowager Lady Jia of Rong-guo’ they called her) and the ladies of the household to make their obeisance. The eunuchs led them up the steps at the east side of the terrace on to the platform in front of the hall, where they ranged themselves in order of precedence.
Once more the lady-in-waiting pronounced the absolving word and they, too, withdrew.
After tea had been offered three times as etiquette prescribed, the Imperial Concubine descended from her throne, the music stopped, and she withdrew into a side room to ‘change her clothes’. A less formal carriage than the imperial palanquin had been prepared which carried her from the garden to her family’s own quarters.
Inside Grandmother Jia’s apartment Yuan-chun became a grandchild once more and knelt down to make her kotow. But Grandmother Jia and the rest knelt down too and prevented her from prostrating herself. She ended up, clinging to Grandmother Jia by one hand and Lady Wang by the other, while the tears streamed down her face, too overcome to say anything. All three of them, in fact, though there was so much they wanted to say, seemed quite incapable of speech and stood there holding each other and sobbing, apparently unable to stop. The others present – Lady Xing, Li Wan, Wang Xi-feng, Ying-chun, Tan-chun and Xi-chun – stood round them weeping silently. No one spoke a word.
Yuan-chun at last restrained her sobs and forced a smile to her tear-stained face:
‘It hasn’t been easy, winning this chance of coming back among you after all those years since I was first walled up in That Place. Now that we are seeing each other at last, we ought to talk and be cheerful, not waste all the time crying! I shall be leaving again in no time at all, and Heaven only knows when I shall have another chance of seeing you!’
At this point she broke down once more and had to be comforted by Lady Xing. When she had composed herself, Grandmother Jia made her sit down while the members of the family came forward one at a time to greet her and say a few words. This was an occasion for further tears. Then the senior menservants of both the Rong-guo and Ning-guo mansions assembled in the courtyard outside and paid their respects. They were followed by the womenservants and maids, who were allowed to come inside the room to make their kotow.
Yuan-chun asked why her Aunt Xue and her cousins Bao-chai and Lin Dai-yu were missing.
‘Relations outside the Jia family are not allowed to see you without a special invitation, dear,’ Lady Wang told her.
Yuan-chun asked them to be invited in immediately, and Aunt Xue and the two girls arrived after a few moments. They would have kotowed to her in accordance with court etiquette had not Yuan-chun hurriedly excused them from doing so. The three of them went up to her, and niece and aunt exchanged news of the years that had elapsed since they last met.
Next Lutany and the other maids who had accompanied Yuan-chun into the Palace came forward to make their kotows to Grandmother Jia. The old lady at once motioned to them to rise and gave instructions to her own servants to entertain them in another room.
The senior eunuchs and the ladies-in-waiting were now led off by members of the staffs of Jia She’s household and the Ning-guo mansion to be entertained elsewhere, leaving only three or four very junior eunuchs in attendance. Yuan-chun was at last free to chat informally with her mother and the other female members of her family and learned for the first time about many personal and domestic events that had occurred in the household since she left it.
Then there was her interview with Jia Zheng, which had to take place with her father standing outside the door-curtain of the room in which she was sitting. Now that she was the Emperor’s woman, this was the nearest to her he could ever hope to get. The sense of deprivation struck home to Yuan-chun as she addressed him through the curtain.
‘What is the use of all this luxury and splendour,’ she said bitterly, ‘if I am to be always separated from those I love -denied the tenderness which even the poorest peasant who seasons his bread with salt and pickles and dresses in hempen homespun is free to enjoy?’
With tears in his eyes the good man delivered the following little speech to the daughter he could not see:
‘Madam.
That a poor and undistinguished household such as o
urs should have produced, as it were, a phoenix from amidst a flock of crows and pies to bask in the sunshine of Imperial favour and shed its reflected beams on the departed representatives of our ancestral line must be attributable to the concentration in your single person of the quintessences of all that is most admirable in celestial and terrestrial nature and the accumulated merit of many generations of our forebears, and is an honour and a blessing in which my wife and I are proud to be participators.
‘Our beloved Emperor, who embodies in his own Sacred Person those life-giving forces which are always invisibly at work in the natural cosmos, has showered down upon his grateful subjects a gracious kindness unprecedented in the annals of recorded history – a kindness which even the expenditure of our life’s blood to the veriest ultimate drop would be wholly inadequate to repay and which only the most unremitting pains and unswerving loyalty in the discharge of those duties to which it has pleased him to call us could adequately express.
‘It is our earnest prayer that His Sacred Majesty may continue long to reign over us, a blessing to all his peoples; and that Your Grace should feel no anxiety concerning the welfare of my wife and myself during our now declining years, but should rather cherish and sustain your own precious person, in order to be the better able to serve His Sacred Majesty with care and diligence, seeking by that service to be worthy of the tender regard and loving favour which he has been graciously pleased to bestow upon you.’
To this formal speech the Imperial Concubine made a formal reply:
‘Sir. It is of course desirable that you should exercise the utmost diligence when engaged upon business of state, but it is to be hoped that you will take sufficient care of your own well-being whenever not so engaged, and will under no circumstances vex yourself with anxiety on our behalf.’
‘The inscriptions at present displayed on the pavilions and other buildings in the garden were composed by Bao-yu,’ said Jia Zheng. ‘If there are any places in the garden which particularly take your fancy, we hope you will name them for us.’