Jia Rui
贾瑞
“The Man Who Looked at the Front”
His Story
Jia Rui is Jia Dairu’s grandson, brought up by the old man after his parents died and kept on a short rein. In Chapter 9 he is left in charge of the clan school and uses the position to sell favours; the brawl that wrecks the schoolroom is partly his doing. In Chapter 11, at Jia Jing’s birthday, he comes on Wang Xifeng alone in the Ning garden and cannot let it go.
Chapter 12 is a trap in two parts, and Xifeng builds both. First she tells him to wait for her in an empty passageway. It is the twelfth month, 朔风凛凛，侵肌裂骨 — the north wind cutting through skin to the bone — and he stands there all night and nearly freezes. He gets home at dawn to a grandfather who beats him thirty or forty strokes for going out without leave, refuses him food, and makes him kneel in the courtyard reciting his lessons. The second time, Jia Rong and Jia Qiang are waiting in the dark; they catch him, extract two notes of fifty taels each, and while he is crouching out of sight a bucket of night soil comes down on him from above.
He takes to his bed and does not get up. Dairu begs two taels of ginseng from the Rong mansion and Xifeng sends sweepings. Then a lame Taoist gives him a mirror, the 风月宝鉴, Precious Mirror of Love, with one instruction: 千万不可照正 面，只照他的背面 — on no account look at the front, only the back. He looks at the back and sees 一个骷髅立在里面, a skeleton standing inside. He turns it over and sees Xifeng, beckoning. He goes in and out of the glass until he dies, and his last words are 让我拿了镜子再走 — let me take the mirror with me. When Dairu calls for fire the mirror weeps: 谁叫你们瞧正面了 — who told you to look at the front?
In Xiang Li's Hands
Two sheets; only one is his story. In it he is flung backwards, eyes rolled white, a blue cloth round his head; one arm shoots up with a round mirror, and inside the glass is a woman, hair piled high, eyes lowered. It is the mirror’s front, the face he was forbidden; she declines the skull on the back.
The other sheet does not fit him: a bearded man in a scholar’s cap among pines, an open fan, a grey hawk. Nothing in his chapters gives him a beard, a fan or a bird; only the inscription makes it his.
The Calligraphy
Both sheets read 贾瑞, surname and given name, and neither uses 天祥, the courtesy name the chapter title reaches for at the moment of his death — 贾天祥正照风月鉴. On the mirror sheet the two characters are brushed fast and loose down the right-hand margin, close in beside his shoulder; on the pine sheet they sit small and high at the top right, half lost among the needles. On that second painting the inscription is the only thing that identifies the sitter.
Connections
- Jia Dairu 贾代儒 — his grandfather and guardian, who beats him for the first trap and begs ginseng for the last illness.
- Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — the object of the obsession and the architect of both traps.
- Jia Rong 贾蓉 — Ning-house nephew who ambushes him in the dark and extorts the promissory notes.
- Jia Qiang 贾蔷 — Jia Rong’s accomplice in the second trap.
- The lame Taoist 跛足道人 — brings him the 风月宝鉴 and takes it back off the fire.
Others of the same kind · Jia clan – collateral branches Jia Dairu 贾代儒 · Jia Qiong 贾琼 · Jia Chang 贾菖 · Jia Ling 贾菱 · Jia Ping 贾萍 · Jia Jun 贾菌 · Jia Yun 贾芸 · Jia Qin 贾芹 · Jia Xing 贾荇 · Xiluan 喜鸾 · Sijie'r 四姐儿
Named on these pages Jia Dairu 贾代儒 · Jin Rong 金荣 · Jia Rui Zhi Mu 贾瑞之母
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
