Bi Zhi'an
毕知庵
“The Doctor from the Broken Temple”
His Story
Chapter 98. Baoyu has been married to Baochai by substitution, Daiyu is dead, and he is sinking — no food, no water, and the famous physicians called in one after another cannot name the illness. In a ruined temple outside the city walls lives a poor doctor surnamed Bi, style-name Zhi’an. He calls it grief and joy striking against each other, cold and heat out of balance, meals missed, anger lodged in the middle, the vital breath stopped up. He measures the dose. By the second watch Baoyu knows people again and asks for water.
He is never mentioned again. The house’s own doctors fail; the man from the broken temple does not.
In Xiang Li's Hands
Grey robe sliding off one shoulder, chest bare, a knotted branch over the shoulder with a basket of flowering herbs slung from it. Thin beard, small soft cap, the face turned back and faintly amused. The background is bare paper. She paints him not as a physician but as a gatherer of plants — the medicine and the poverty in one load.
The Calligraphy
毕知庵 — surname and 别号, the studio-name a man takes for himself, exactly as the novel gives him and exactly what a doctor with no practice and no register entry would have.
Connections
- Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — his patient, and the only one he treats.
- Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — dies in the same chapter; her death is half the diagnosis.
- Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — the new wife in the room he is called to.
- Xue Yima 薛姨妈 — among those who send everywhere for doctors before him.
- Jia Mu 贾母 — only rests once his medicine has worked.
Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiang Li painted all 413 characters of the novel between 1975 and 1985, the first person to complete the entire cast. See the whole collection · Chinese Empresses
