Huashen

Her Story

Not a character but a presiding power, and a collective one. The novel is explicit that there is a god for every kind of flower and a chief god over all of them, and it never brings one on stage or gives one a name.

Chapter 27 is the great occasion. The twenty-sixth of the fourth month, when Grain in Ear falls: by old custom, offerings are set out on that day 祭饯花神, to see the Flower God off, since after Grain in Ear it is summer, the blossom is finished, and 花神退位 — the god steps down from office. The women of the house keep the custom more than anyone. The Garden is up early, and every tree and every branch is tied with palanquins and horses folded from petals and willow, and banners and pennons made of gauze and brocade. It is on that morning, with the whole Garden decked for the departure, that Daiyu buries the flowers and sings: 花谢花飞花满天，红消香断有谁怜？

The rest of the appearances are small and telling. In Chapter 42 the almanac is consulted over Qiaojie’s fever and gives 病者在东南方得遇花神 — the patient met a Flower God in the southeast — and Xifeng laughs that the Garden is certainly full of them. In Chapter 58 Baoyu invents an apricot flower god on the spot to save Ouguan from a beating over burnt paper money. In Chapter 77 a maid tells him that Qingwen, dying, said heaven was one flower god short and the Jade Emperor had called her up to fill the post; pressed on which flower, the girl looks at the lotus in the pool and says that one. Baoyu, who wants to believe it, then writes the elegy for her. By Chapter 102 that story has turned into Garden gossip about spirits, and in Chapter 116 he mistakes the immortal guarding the Crimson Pearl plant for a flower god too.

Nobody is ever confirmed in the office. The one appointment reported is second-hand from a child who is plainly making it up as she goes.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She stands full length in pale sea-green gauze, open at the chest, a heavy gold and coral collar with dangling drops, bracelets to the elbow, a red mark between the brows, hair built into black loops. One lotus bud on a long stem rises past her shoulder; a dark banded rod runs horizontally behind her at hip height, both ends showing. The background is the only fully worked one in this group — a dense confetti of red, rose, blue and gold, blossom dissolved into weather. She paints the god as the flowers seen off in Chapter 27, and gives her the lotus that Qingwen was said to have been given.

The Calligraphy

花神, two characters low on the right against the drifting colour — a divine office rather than a name, which is the only designation the novel ever uses, for one god or for all of them.

Connections

• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — who buries flowers and sings the Flower Burial Song on
• the day the god is seen off.
• Qingwen 晴雯 — reported at her death to have been appointed a flower god,
• the lotus one.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — who believes the report, argues that there is a god per
• flower and a chief above them, and writes her elegy.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — who has paper money sent out to the southeast when the
• almanac blames a flower god for Qiaojie’s fever.

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