The Crab-Flower Club
Page 63
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This translation first published 1977
Copyright © David Hawkes, 1977
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196890-2
1. See Appendix I, p. 583.
1. See Appendix II, p. 586.
I. See Appendix III, p. 588.
1. See Appendix III, p. 588.
* Stone’s Note to Reader:
These screens were embroidered by a Soochow girl called Hui-niang, who, as member of a highly-cultivated Service family and an accomplished amateur painter and calligrapher, embroidered only occasionally for her own diversion and not as a means of making money. As the flowers embroidered on them were all copied from flower-paintings by famous masters, their design and colouring were far superior to the cruder, more garish productions of professional embroiderers; and the accompanying verses, all chosen with impeccable taste from a wide range of literary sources, were executed in black embroidery-silk with such consummate skill that every hook and squiggle, every variation in thickness of line, every join and break in the brush-written ‘grass script’ calligraphy was exactly reproduced, not mangled and deformed as in the stilted, wooden attempts at copying of the commercial embroiderer.
Since Hui-niang did not depend on her embroidery for a living, specimens of it, despite its great fame, have always been hard to come by. Even among the rich and great there are very few households which can boast a specimen. Such as do exist are referred to by collectors as ‘Hui embroidery’. But what are sometimes sold as specimens of ‘Hui embroidery’ today invariably turn out to be imitations deliberately made to take in the inexpert buyer. The real Hui-niang died tragically at the age of eighteen, and there are in fact no genuine specimens of her work now to be had, since the few houses which possess a piece or two hold on to them tenaciously and refuse to part with them to would-be purchasers. Indeed, if a genuine specimen of Hui-niang’s work were ever to come upon the market, its value would be incalculable. The Jia family originally possessed three, of which two had been presented as a gift to the Emperor only a year previously, leaving this set of sixteen little table-screens, to which Grandmother Jia was so much attached that she kept them always in her own apartment, unwilling that they should remain with the stock of objects commonly drawn on for the family’s entertainment of guests, and only rarely, on occasions of her own devising, brought them out to be Stone admired.
1. A very fine description of this play can be found in Dr H. C. Chang’s Chinese Literature: Popular Fiction and Drama, Edinburgh 1973, pp. 268–72.