Huang Jin Li Shi
黄巾力士
“Get Out”
His Story
The Yellow-Turban Strongmen are Daoist guardian spirits, borrowed into the novel from popular religion — the muscle of the heavens, summoned to seize and to drive out. They appear in Chapter 116, in Gao E’s continuation.
Baoyu, lying senseless after his relapse, is led back to the Land of Illusion. He reads the registers a second time — the willow-sash line, the gold hairpin in the snow — and then goes stumbling from one dead woman to the next: a fairy guarding the Crimson Pearl Plant who threatens to have the strongmen beat him out, You Sanjie with a drawn sword, someone with Qingwen’s face who says she is not Qingwen, a woman on a throne with Daiyu’s features behind a raised pearl curtain, and Qin Keqing standing where he thought Xifeng stood. He begins to cry. Then several Yellow-Turban strongmen come at him with whips: 何处男人敢闯 入我们这天仙福地来，快走出去 — what man dares force his way into this paradise of ours, get out.
The women he had been calling to turn into demons and join the chase. He is saved by the monk with the mirror, who says he comes on the orders of the Imperial Consort.
They have one line, and it is the point of the whole episode: he is a man now, and the place is shut to him.
In Xiang Li's Hands
Bare-chested, dark and ruddy, beard bristling, eyes glaring white, mouth open on a shout. A yellow head-cloth under a small gold crown, ribbons flying; a red robe fallen off both shoulders; one fist cocked, the other hand swinging a long jewelled bar over his head. No cloud, no gate, no Baoyu. She paints him at the instant of the shout, with nothing to shout at — the only figure in this group given a temple-guardian’s body rather than a portrait sitting.
The Calligraphy
黄巾力士, four characters at the lower left in a blunt, heavy hand: a species of spirit, not a name, and there is more than one of him in the text.
Connections
- 贾宝玉 Jia Baoyu — whom they whip out of the Land of Illusion in Chapter 116.
- 秦可卿 Qin Keqing — the last face he sees before they come for him.
- 警幻仙子 Jinghuan — mistress of the place they are guarding.
- 贾元春 Jia Yuanchun — on whose authority the monk arrives and ends the chase.
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
