The Crab-Flower Club

by Cao Xueqin

  Presently, while they all sat watching the players, Lin Zhi-xiao’s wife came into the hall leading six other women, each pair of whom were carrying between them a small kang-table covered with a red felt top on which was a bundle of strung cash: hundreds and hundreds of newly-minted copper coins, specially chosen for size and quality, fastened together by a single long cord of crimson silk. Under the direction of Lin Zhi-xiao’s wife two of these tables were set down in front of Mrs Li and Aunt Xue and the third one beside Grandmother Jia’s settle.

  ‘Do it in the middle, where everyone can see,’ said Grandmother Jia.

  The women all knew what was expected of them. Setting the tables down in the centre of the hall, they simultaneously undid the ends of the crimson cords with which the money was fastened and began pulling them out so that the coins tumbled in heaps upon the tables.

  The play being performed on this occasion was The House in Ping-kang Lane, and the actors had just come to the end of that section of it called ‘Meeting in the Sickroom’. The hero Yu Shu-ye, having at last met the love of his life only to be called by stern duty from her side, had just left the stage in chagrin. At this point the child-actor playing the part of his little page Leopard Boy, observing what was going on in the hall, began to extemporize:

  ‘You can go off in a huff if you like; but today is the fifteenth of the first month and old Lady Jia of Rong-guo House is holding a family party; so what I am going to do is to get on this horse and gallop there as quickly as I can and ask them for some sweeties!’

  This caused Grandmother Jia and the rest of the audience to burst out laughing.

  ‘That’s a sharp little fellow,’ said Aunt Xue. ‘How sweet!’

  ‘And he’s barely nine,’ said Xi-feng.

  ‘Barely nine!’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘And being able to come out with it so pat!’

  She nodded in the direction of the waiting women.

  ‘Largesse!’

  Three of the women had already provided themselves with small shallow baskets in readiness for this order. At the word of command they walked up to the little tables, shovelled up basketfuls of coins from the heaped-up money, and took them outside to the foot of the stage which Leopard Boy had just vacated.

  ‘Largesse from Lady Jia, Mrs Xue and Mrs Li for Leopard Boy to buy himself some sweets with,’ said one of the women.

  The three of them then discharged the contents of their baskets upon the stage. The money landed with a mighty clatter and at once the whole stage was covered with shining pennies.

  Cousin Zhen had ordered his own pages to have a large flat basket of money ready for his own largesse to the players.

  But you will have to wait for the next volume, gentle reader, in order to find out whether they received it.

  EXPLICIT SECUNDA PARS LAPIDIS HISTORIAE

  Appendix I

  Regulated Verse

  REGULATED Verse, a form which was perfected in the eighth century and continued to be the most commonly used verse form until modern times, exploits the characteristic tonality of the Chinese language, using a very rigid formal structure in which tension is created by combining tonal contrast with verbal parallelism. Two metres only are allowed, the pentasyllabic (five syllables) and the heptasyllabic (seven syllables) and only one of them may be used in the same poem. For prosodic purposes the four tones of medieval Chinese are divided into two classes, level and oblique, and only level-tone words may be used as rhymes.

  Except in a variation of the form called Linked Verse and in the Regulated Verse quatrain, which has slightly different rules, all Regulated Verse poems have eight lines (four couplets) and have the same rhyme throughout in alternate lines (11.2, 4, 6 and 8), rhyme in the first line being optional (1, 2,4, 6, 8). In the two central couplets (11.3 and 4 and 11.5 and 6) there has to be verbal parallelism: that is to say, if you have ‘brown cow’ in the first line of the couplet, you must have some matching expression such as ‘white horse’ in the same position in the following line. This verbal parallelism sometimes extends to the first and, more rarely, to the last couplet as well. Tonal contrast has to be observed throughout the whole poem, in all four couplets. Several patterns of tonal contrast are possible. The following is one of the two patterns available for a Regulated Verse poem in pentasyllabics, using o to represent level and x to represent oblique tones. The underlined symbols represent the rhymes:

  In practice it is only the second, fourth and final syllables of each line that must conform to the pattern. In the great majority of Regulated Verse poems there are four or five syllables occurring in the first or third place which do not conform, and wholly conforming poems are comparatively rare. Nevertheless the form is an extremely difficult one to master, and was made doubly so for Bao-yu and the girls by the fact that the tones and rhymes of the medieval poetic language to which the verses had to conform no longer corresponded with the tones and pronunciation of the language they spoke. Speakers of Southern Standard English may get some faint idea of what this must have been like if they try to imagine the difficulty of avoiding ‘Cockney rhymes’ in some English of the future which made no distinction in either pronunciation or spelling between ‘caw’ and ‘core’.

  The following, using noughts and crosses again to represent level and oblique tones and underlining to indicate the rhymes, is a transcription of Tan-chun’s crab-flower poem in modern (i.e. Tan-chun’s) pronunciation.

  This is in heptasyllabic metre and the tonal pattern is somewhat more complicated than the one in the example just given. It will be seen that the rhymes, which would have been perfect rhymes to a Tang poet, are in two cases merely conventional rhymes for Tan-chun. The ‘non-conforming’ syllables are bracketed:

  A comparison of the above with any of my translations will show that I have been unable to reproduce the Chinese rhyme-scheme in its entirety. (The tonal pattern cannot, of course, be reproduced, because English is not, in the Chinese sense, a tonal language.) For facility of rhyming, Chinese is like Italian: it is possible to use the same rhyme – as is in fact done in chapter 50 – a score or more times in succession almost without trying, which is, of course, emphatically not the case in English. But though the rhyme-scheme I have adopted is a somewhat different one from the Chinese and my renderings may be accounted of little or no poetic value, at least they should give the reader some idea of the cross-word puzzle nature of the task which the young members of the poetry club had set themselves, and enable him to appreciate why several of them elsewhere in the novel express vehement dislike of what they call ‘set rhymes’.

  Appendix II

  Threesomes with the Dominoes

  THE Chinese ‘tiles’ of bone or ivory which I generally translate ‘dominoes’ were in appearance very similar to our dominoes, though the games played with them were more often the sort of games we play with cards. The same word, pai, is in fact used in Chinese for both the dominoes and the old-fashioned Chinese playing-cards. Dominoes are ‘bone pai’ and cards are ‘paper pai’, but the qualifying word is often omitted and in the text of the novel it is not always clear which of the two is intended.

  Chinese dominoes differed from ours in having coloured spots – green and red – on a white ground. Aces and fours were red, the other numbers were green, except that double sixes were half and half. In both dice and dominoes there were conventional names for certain combinations: a double six was ‘heaven’ or ‘the sky’, a double ace ‘earth’, a double four ‘man’, a double five ‘plum’, a four and a six ‘the embroidered screen’. Some of these conventional names are used by Faithful in her calls: for example, she calls ‘the bright blue sky’ for Grandmother Jia’s double six and ‘the Man’ for Grannie Liu’s double four. In other cases both she and the players replying modify the conventional usage or invent their own interpretations. Thus single – not just double – sixes are interpreted as ‘sky’, a single five becomes ‘plum’ (or simply ‘flower’), a four, because of its four red spots, suggesting petals, may a
lso become a flower, the single red spot of the ace suggests the sun or a cherry, the green double three suggests duckweed on water, and so on.

  In the following diagrams the red spots are represented by white circles and the green spots by black ones.

  Appendix III

  Unsolved Riddles

  THE answer to Bao-chai’s riddle (p. 510) is evidently ‘a fir cone’. Temples sometimes had little bells fastened to their eaves. The cones hanging from the boughs are likened to soundless bells hanging from the ‘eaves’ of the tree.

  I have assumed the answer to Bao-yu’s riddle to be ‘a pigeon flute’ – a little bamboo whistle tied to a pigeon’s leg so as to give off a musical note when the bird is in flight. Flocks of pigeons emitting this delightful music were still to be heard in the air above Peking’s courtyards as recently as 1950.

  The answer to Dai-yu’s riddle is thought to be ‘a revolving lantern’ – a lantern with cut-out figures (in this case, presumably, galloping horses) which revolve when the candle inside it is lit, working on the same principle as our ‘angel chimes’. Dai-yu’s lantern appears to have a stationary frieze of islands supported on the backs of turtles (like the Isles of the Blest in Chinese mythology) above which the cardboard horses revolve.

  Bao-qin’s concealed riddles (chapter 51, p. 512 seq.) are much harder to find answers to, and the learned eighteenth and nineteenth century readers whose guesses are recorded are startlingly at variance with each other in the solutions they offer. In the notes which follow I usually mention only one of the available answers, for the simple reason that, as I have had to make each of the translations with one particular answer in mind, I have tended to produce versions to which the other solutions are no longer plausible alternatives.

  RED CLIFF

  Red Cliff, near the modern city of Wuchang on the R. Yangtze, was the scene of one of China’s most famous battles when in A.D. 208 the adventurer Liu Bei, later to become founder of the kingdom of Shu in Szechwan, and Zhou Yu, general of the recently established kingdom of Wu whose capital was at Nanking, combined forces to defeat the armada of Cao Cao, who, acting as titular Chancellor of the puppet Han emperor, had recently consolidated his hold over the whole of northern China and was now attempting to extend his control south of the river.

  This troubled period of China’s history, dominated by the power-struggles of warlords and condottieri, is the theme of China’s great prose epic, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which up until modern times supplied much of the stock-in-trade of the Chinese theatre.

  In The Romance of the Three Kingdoms Cao Cao, historically one of the wisest and most beneficent rulers of his day, becomes a scheming villain. The heroes of the epic are Liu Bei and his sworn brothers Zhang Fei and Guan Yu. (Guan Yu was later deified as Guan-di, the God of War.) This trio, like the Three Musketeers who really were four, were joined by a fourth hero, Liu Bei’s adviser Zhu-ge Liang, who in the epic becomes a sort of Merlin, able to read prophecies in the stars and summon up winds by magic. According to the epic it was Zhu-ge Liang who thought of the fire-ships which burned Cao Cao’s troop transports (referred to in the poem) and who raised the wind which blew them onto their target.

  The best available explanation of the riddle concealed in this poem is that of Gao E’s contemporary, Xu Fengyi, who thought it was ‘a dharma-boat’. What these objects were is explained in a little booklet called An Account of the Most Notable Annual Festivals and Customs of the Imperial Capital written by a contemporary of Cao Xueqin called Pan Rongbi and published in 1758. He tells us that on the Buddhist Festival of All Souls on the fifteenth of the seventh month it was the custom in Peking to construct boats as much as fifty or sixty feet long out of bamboo and paper to represent the Buddhist ‘ship of salvation’ (i.e. the teaching of the Lord Buddha), which were launched on the nearest available stretch of water and set on fire. Pan Rongbi does not say so, but it seems to me quite likely that the ‘ship of souls’ might have carried paper banners inscribed with names of the recently departed whose salvation was requested. This would explain the ‘naught but their names’ of the second line of this quatrain.

  HANOI

  Ma Yuan (14 B.C.-A.D. 49) was a Chinese empire-builder of the Later Han period whose most famous military exploit was to reestablish Chinese hegemony in Hanoi. He is also said to have erected a column of brass to mark the southern limit of Han dominion. I have to admit that the point of the ‘Iron Flute’ reference escapes me.

  The likeliest answer to the riddle seems to be ‘a brass trumpet’.

  MT ZHONG-SHAN

  The ‘you’ of this poem is Lei Cizong (A.D. 385–448), a would-be recluse who was repeatedly hauled out of retirement by a talent-spotting emperor and forced to become a professor. Mt Zhong-shan near Nanking is where, on the last of these occasions, the emperor constructed a special ashram to house him in.

  The likeliest answer to the riddle seems to be ‘a string puppet.’

  HUAI-YIN

  Han Xin (d. 196 B.C.), foremost among the great captains who helped Gao-zu to become founder of the Han dynasty, rose from very humble beginnings as an unemployed and often hungry young ne‘er-do-well in Huai-yin. (Later in life he was to become Marquis of Huai-yin.) While a poor down-and-out he was on one occasion fed by an old washerwoman, whom he rewarded magnificently years later when he came into his own. This is the incident referred to in the second half of the quatrain.

  Like most of Gao-zu’s great generals, Han Xin ultimately fell a victim of Gao-zu’s suspicious nature – though it was not Gao-zu himself but his savage empress, Lü-hou, who seized Han Xin by a trick and had him executed. Gao-zu’s suspicions may be said to have dated from an incident in the fighting which preceded the establishment of the new dynasty, in which Han Xin, having just made himself master of the area of China called Qi, more or less insisted that Gao-zu, who was in difficulties at the time, should recognize him as King of Qi. This appears to be what the second line of the quatrain is referring to. The first line I think refers to the fact that Han Xin’s final undoing came about when one of his servants, fearful that Han Xin was about to proceed against his brother, laid information against him to the empress. (Even the lowest cur, when cornered, will turn and bite you.)

  One eighteenth-century scholar thought that the answer to the riddle concealed in this quatrain was ‘a close-stool’, which certainly fits line 2, and I suppose line 4 too. It makes the riddle seem a somewhat scatological one for a well-bred young lady to compose; though I am not at all sure that a contemporary Chinese would have found the idea of a young lady making jokes about excrement shocking. The best of the solutions proposed seems to me to be ‘a hare’. It fits line 1 very well, and the fact that there was a famous remark made by Han Xin and preserved in the history books which has to do with a dog and a hare predisposes me to think that that is the answer. If it is, it is less easy to see in what ways the other lines are relevant, however. In the last resort I have to confess that this quatrain still baffles me.

  GUANG-LING

  Guang-ling was the starting-point of the magnificent willow-lined Grand Canal constructed for the scandalous emperor Yang-di of the Sui dynasty, who reigned from A.D. 605–16.

  The best of the answers that have been suggested for the concealed riddle is ‘a toothpick’.

  PEACH LEAF FORD

  The Peach Leaf Ford near Nanking was named after a favourite concubine of Wang Xian-zhi (A.D. 344–88), son of the celebrated ‘grass script’ calligrapher Wang Xi-zhi and himself a distinguished calligrapher and littérateur. There was a popular song which was supposed to have been made by Wang Xian-zhi in her honour, though its attribution to him is probably rather fanciful:

  Peach Leaf, o, my Peach Leaf dear,

  Cross the river and have no fear.

  To cross the river you need no oar,

  And here I am waiting upon the shore.

  The answer to the riddle is thought to be ‘a door-god’. Door-gods (mentioned in chapter 53) took the
form of colour prints representing ferocious-looking warriors. They were sold in pairs around the time of the New Year and stuck up on the double doors of gateways to repel evil influences and prevent them from crossing the threshold. Like many other demon-repelling talismans, they were originally made of peach-wood, which was believed to be an effective prophylactic against the powers of darkness. The ‘peach-wood’ element often remained in the names of such objects long after peach-wood had been replaced by paper or some other material in their manufacture. Thus the slips stuck up at the sides of gateways in chapter 53 (p. 567) are referred to in the Chinese text as ‘peach-wood charms’ though in fact they were simply strips of scarlet paper.

  GREEN MOUND

  Green Mound, near Guisui in Suiyuan province, was reputedly the grave of Lady Bright (Wang Zhaojun, al. Ming-fei), the unfortunate court lady who in the 1st century B.C. was passed off as a Chinese princess and sent north into the frozen steppes to become the consort of the Hunnish king.

  Green Mound is near the banks of the Black River, which, according to one version of the legend, Lady Bright jumped into rather than continue her journey into a life of exile. It is a tributary of the Hwang-ho near the most northerly part of its course. In translating it ‘Amur’ for reasons of poetical expediency I have used the same licence as the medieval playwright who makes her jump into the ‘Black Dragon River’ – which is, in fact, the Chinese name for the Amur. Green Mound was supposed to be so called because Lady Bright’s grave was the only green place in the miles of surrounding desert.