Fengshui Xiansheng

His Story

A trade, not a person. No individual geomancer is named in the novel, and none of them speaks.

Twice, though, the work is done on the page, both times for Qin Keqing. In Chapter 13, with the funeral to arrange and Jia Zhen determined to spend everything he has, he sends 去请钦天监阴阳司来择日 — for the Yin-Yang Office of the Board of Astronomy, to fix the dates. They set the coffin to lie forty-nine days, mourning to open on the third. Everything else in that enormous funeral — the hundred and eight monks, the ninety-nine Taoists, the forbidden coffin-wood — hangs off the calendar those men hand over.

Then in Chapter 14, with the burial near, Jia Zhen takes a carriage out to Iron Threshold Temple himself, 带了阴阳司吏 — with a clerk of the same office — 往铁 槛寺来踏看寄灵所在, to walk the ground where the coffin will rest. Chapter 15 notes that the temple keeps both kinds of dwelling ready, for the living and the dead, because the clan has been putting its coffins there for generations.

That is the work: name the day, walk the ground, say nothing quotable. The phrase 风水先生 itself does not occur anywhere in the hundred and twenty chapters.

In Xiang Li's Hands

The strangest sheet in this group. A small white-haired man in a green cap, bent almost double, occupies the top corner; from his shoulders an enormous black robe pours down and fills two thirds of the paper in wet ink. In his other hand, out to the right, he holds up a broad flat tablet dotted and scrawled with red — a compass face, or an almanac. Braided cords hang from his waist with a gourd weight at the end. The terrain he is supposedly reading is barely indicated at all.

The Calligraphy

风水先生, four characters down the right in a plain upright hand, giving the occupation and no name at all — which is all the novel gives either.

Connections

• Jia Zhen 贾珍 — who sends for the Yin-Yang Office and then drives out with
• its clerk to inspect the resting place.
• Qin Keqing 秦可卿 — whose funeral is the only occasion in the novel where
• this work is shown being done.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — who manages the forty-nine days the office lays down.

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