Jia Baoyu

His Story

The novel begins twice before he is born. In Chapter 1 the goddess Nüwa smelts thirty-six thousand five hundred and one stones to mend the sky and uses all but one, left at the foot of Greensickness Peak 青埂峰 — conscious, articulate, rejected. A monk and a Taoist shrink it to a fan-pendant and carry it into the world of dust. The same chapter has the Divine Luminescent Stone-in-Waiting 神瑛侍者 watering a crimson pearl plant with dew until it takes human form; when he descends, she follows to repay the water in tears. Baoyu is the second of these beings. The first is the jade found in his mouth at birth, inscribed 「莫失莫忘，仙寿恒昌」 — lose me not, forget me not; life eternal shall be yours. In Chapter 8 Baochai reads it and he reads the matching line on her gold locket, and the household draws the obvious conclusion. He spends a hundred and twenty chapters refusing it.

Second son of Jia Zheng 贾政 and Lady Wang 王夫人 of the Rongguo House, favourite grandson of the matriarch. In Chapter 2 the broker Leng Zixing 冷子兴 supplies the family’s verdict: at the first-birthday grabbing test the child reached past the seal and the brush for rouge and hairpins, and his father decided then what he would become. The same account reports his saying — 「女儿是水作的骨肉，男人是泥作的骨肉」, girls are made of water and men are made of mud. Not gallantry: a cosmology, and he never abandons it.

In Chapter 3 Daiyu arrives from Yangzhou. He looks at her and announces he has met this cousin before. Told she has no jade, he tears his own off and throws it down, on the reasoning that a thing the best person in the room lacks is not worth having. In Chapter 5 he falls asleep in Qin Keqing’s room and walks into the Land of Illusion, where he reads the registers of the women of his own house without understanding a line, hears the twelve songs, and is told by the fairy Disenchantment that he is the most lustful creature alive — not in the body but in the mind, 意淫. The first song is sung in his voice: 「都道是金玉良姻，俺只念木石前盟。」 Everyone calls it the fine match of gold and jade; I think only of the old vow of stone and plant.

Then the long middle, which is mostly happiness. In Chapter 17 his father drags him round the new garden to compose couplets for its gates and pavilions; he does it brilliantly and is insulted throughout. In Chapter 23 the cousins move into the garden; he takes the Happy Red Court 怡红院 and reads a forbidden play with Daiyu behind the rockery. In Chapter 37 they found the Crab-flower Club and he is named 怡红公子 after his courtyard, having offered up an older childhood sobriquet, 绛洞花主. In Chapter 38 they eat crabs and write chrysanthemum poems; Daiyu takes the top three places, his two — 访菊 and 种菊 — take none, and he says cheerfully 「我又落第」— failed again. It is the only examination he minds failing.

The garden has costs. In Chapter 30 the maid Jinchuan 金钏 is slapped and dismissed by his mother over an idle remark of his, and drowns herself in a well. In Chapter 33 that death, together with his friendship with the actor Jiang Yuhan 蒋玉菡, produces the beating: his father flogs him nearly to death and the household has to be raised to stop it. In Chapter 34 Daiyu comes to his bedside; afterwards he sends her two old handkerchiefs, and she understands, and writes on them. In Chapter 43 he slips out of the city to burn a pinch of earth as incense for Jinchuan. In Chapter 57 Zijuan tells him Daiyu is to be sent back south, and he goes rigid and wordless for days. In Chapter 78, after Qingwen 晴雯 is thrown out of the house to die, he writes the 芙蓉女儿诔, addressing a dismissed maid in the language reserved for queens.

The end is procedural, which makes it worse. In Chapter 94 the jade disappears and his mind goes with it. In Chapters 96 to 98 the family, needing him married and lucid, tells him the bride is Daiyu and puts Baochai under the veil; Daiyu dies across the garden while the wedding music plays. He recovers slowly, and with his mind the knowledge of what was done. In Chapter 119 he sits the provincial examination, places seventh, and walks out of the compound for good. In Chapter 120 his father, held up by snow at the Piling relay station 毗陵驿, sees a figure on the bank — head shaved, feet bare, a great red felt cape over the shoulders. It bows four times and says nothing. A monk and a Taoist take him by the arms, and the three go off into the snow singing of the return to Greensickness Peak. Baochai is pregnant. The stone has finished looking at the world.

In Xiang Li's Hands

He is the most expensively dressed figure in the collection, and that is the argument. A tall black hat with gilt finial and red pom; a blue-grey cloak in enormous wet strokes, hooding the shoulders, its train dragging across the lower right; under it a mauve robe with cusped coral-and-turquoise embroidery at the hem, olive sleeves lined red, a jade-plaque belt, gilt cloud ornaments on coral tassels. Miaoyu is given one teapot. Baoyu is given a treasury.

The face is left unresolved: round, pale, small red mouth, long eyes under a heavy fringe. A girl’s face, uncorrected. The hair is undressed, blown to the right in loose ink, a red ribbon loose in it. The hands are the finest drawing on the sheet, thin pale outline against all that wet speed — the right raised, holding one yellow chrysanthemum on a hair-thin stem; the left closed on a dark bundle the painting declines to name. Bare paper, one soft shadow. The chrysanthemum sets him in autumn and no further. Of the 413 sheets she painted between twenty-five and thirty-five almost all are women; he is the one man they are arranged around, and he gets the brush she gives the girls.

The Calligraphy

贾宝玉 — three characters straight down the left margin in a broad, wet, running hand, the seal set far across at the right. Nearly every sheet in this collection gives the personal name alone — 黛玉, 宝钗, 探春, 惜春 — the form used inside a family, by people who need no surname to know who is meant. This one adds the clan. The full name is what the outside world calls him, house before boy, in the order of the genealogy and the lawsuit: the one figure the whole novel is built around is also the one addressed formally, from a distance, roughly the way his father addresses him.

Connections

• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — his cousin, and in the previous existence the plant he watered daily; the debt she comes to repay is his.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — his cousin and eventually his wife, matched to him by the gold locket and the jade, and married to him under a substitution he does not discover until afterwards.
• Jia Zheng 贾政 — his father, who flogs him in Chapter 33 and sees him for the last time on a snowbank in Chapter 120.
• Jia Mu 贾母 — his grandmother, whose protection makes his whole childhood in the garden possible.
• Xiren 袭人 — his principal maid, who manages him, warns his mother about him, and is married off to Jiang Yuhan after he leaves.
• Qingwen 晴雯 — the maid dismissed and dead in Chapter 77, for whom he writes the elegy in Chapter 78.

Others of the same kind · Jia clan – Rongguo House Jia Yuanchun 贾元春 · Jia Tanchun 贾探春 · Jia Yingchun 贾迎春 · Jia Mu 贾母 · Jia Zheng 贾政 · Jia She 贾赦 · Jia Lian 贾琏 · Jia Huan 贾环 · Jia Lan 贾兰 · Jia Zhu 贾珠 · Jia Daishan 贾代善 · Jia Min 贾敏

Named on these pages Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 · Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 · Jia Yuanchun 贾元春 · Jia Tanchun 贾探春 · Shi Xiangyun 史湘云 · Miaoyu 妙玉 · Jia Yingchun 贾迎春 · Qin Keqing 秦可卿 · Jia Mu 贾母 · Wang Furen 王夫人 · Qingwen 晴雯 · Xiren 袭人 and 101 more

The Speaking Portrait

Xiang Li’s painting, animated and given a voice. Press play.

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