Jia Tanchun

Her Story

She is Jia Zheng’s third daughter and his only daughter by a concubine. Her mother is Zhao Yiniang; her full brother is Jia Huan. In a family that keeps exact accounts of such things, that is the fact that shapes her, and the whole of her life is an argument against letting it be the fact that describes her.

Lin Daiyu sees her on her first evening in the house, in Chapter 3: sloping shoulders, a slender waist, a long figure, a quick and level gaze, so distinguished that one forgot the vulgar world looking at her. She is the sister a reader notices second and remembers longest.

She is also the one who makes things happen. In Chapter 37 she sends Baoyu a letter — formal, ornate, and openly enjoying its own formality — proposing that the cousins found a poetry society, and out of that note comes the Crab-flower Club, the institution that gives the Prospect Garden its best years. She takes the sobriquet 蕉下客, Guest Beneath the Plantain, for the banana palm outside her window. Daiyu points out at once that in the old story a deer was hidden under plantain leaves, so Tanchun has just announced herself as venison. Tanchun takes the joke and keeps the name.

Her room, described in Chapter 40, is the clearest portrait of her in the novel. Three bays with no partitions between them. A huge rosewood and marble table stacked with rubbings of famous calligraphy and dozens of inkstones, and brush pots with the brushes standing in them 「如树林一般」 — like a forest. A Mi Fu landscape on the west wall, a couplet in Yan Zhenqing’s hand beside it, a Ru-ware vase crammed with white chrysanthemums, a great dish of Buddha’s-hand citrons. No embroidery frame, no toys. It is a scholar’s studio, and it belongs to a girl who will never be permitted to sit an examination.

Chapters 55 and 56 are her hour. Wang Xifeng falls ill, and Wang Furen puts the household into the hands of Li Wan, Tanchun and Xue Baochai. Tanchun audits it. She finds allowances being paid twice and cuts them; then, in Chapter 56, she farms out the garden’s plots to the senior servant women, who tend them, sell the produce and keep a share. It is a small piece of sane economics inside a house that is quietly bleeding to death, and it works. It is also the moment she is most hated. In Chapter 55 her birth mother comes to demand extra burial money for Zhao Guoji, Zhao Yiniang’s brother, and Tanchun refuses, saying flatly 「谁是我舅舅？」 — who is my uncle? Her uncle, she says, is Wang Ziteng. It is cruel, it is the only answer the system leaves her, and she knows it. In the same scene she says the sentence the whole novel turns on: if she were a man she could have gone out long ago and made something of herself, but she is a girl, and not even a loose word is allowed her.

In Chapter 74 the household searches the Prospect Garden by night for the owner of an embroidered purse. Tanchun has her own maids’ boxes opened by her own hand and forbids anyone to touch them, and when Wang Shanbao’s wife plucks at her clothing she strikes her across the face. Then she says what nobody else in the book will say aloud: a great family cannot be killed from outside; a hundred-legged insect dies but does not fall over; it must first begin killing itself from within, and then the collapse is total.

Her prophecy in Chapter 5 shows two figures flying a kite, a wide sea, and a great ship carrying a woman who covers her face and weeps. The verse: 「才自精明志自高，生于末世运偏消。清明涕送江边望，千里东风一梦遥。」 Ability keen, ambition high, born into the last days of a house whose luck is running out; tears at the riverside at the Qingming festival; a thousand miles of east wind and a dream a long way off. Her lantern riddle in Chapter 22 answers to the same object — a kite, 「游丝一断浑无力」, the drifting thread once snapped, all strength gone. Jia Zheng reads the children’s riddles that night, understands that every one of them is an omen, and goes to bed frightened.

She is married off in Chapter 100 to the son of an officer stationed on the sea frontier and taken a thousand miles from the house she tried to save. Baoyu weeps himself sick over it. In Chapter 119, with the family broken and Baoyu gone, she comes home once, grandly dressed, an outsider now — the only one of the sisters who survives, at the cost of never living there again.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She paints the writer, not the administrator. Tanchun stands with a brush held upright against her lower lip — the poet’s gesture, the pause before the line comes — and in her other hand, held at arm’s length, a large sheet of paper, completely blank. The blankness is the point. This is the moment before the Chapter 37 letter, not after it.

The dress is loud where the face is quiet: a crimson under-robe swirled with darker red, a green mantle scattered with white and yellow flowerheads, heavy black contours that behave like calligraphy rather than tailoring. A red rose sits at her temple. The face is small, pale and lowered, the eyes entirely inward.

Then the strangeness. Behind her, in dilute ink and thin colour, a crowd of ghostly figures — bearded elders, a lame man with a crutch and two gourds, a woman with a long-necked lute, a helmeted soldier, a bare-bellied laughing immortal. This is the visual vocabulary of Daoist immortals and stage-opera types, and nothing in Tanchun’s story summons it. It may be a painted screen, a hanging, or the company already crowding her head. The upper left quadrant is bare paper, the quietest thing in the picture.

The Calligraphy

探春 — the personal name alone, two characters in a loose running hand set into the top right corner. No surname, no title. Compare 史湘云 on the next sheet, where the full family name is given: Tanchun is a daughter of the house, and you say her name the way the household says it, without ceremony. For a woman who spent Chapter 55 insisting on the exact terms of her own kinship, an inscription that assumes everyone knows whose daughter she is has an edge to it.

Connections

• Zhao Yiniang 赵姨娘 — her birth mother, Jia Zheng’s concubine, whom she publicly refuses to treat as kin in Chapter 55.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her half-brother, the recipient of the letter that founds the poetry club, and the one who breaks down at her marriage in Chapter 100.
• Jia Huan 贾环 — her full younger brother, and everything she is determined not to be.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — the manager whose place she takes in Chapters 55–56, and who praises her to Pinger as the ablest of the girls, adding only that it is a pity she was not born to Wang Furen.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — her co-administrator during the reform, who supplies the tact Tanchun will not.
• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — fellow member of the Crab-flower Club, and the one who names her a deer under the plantain leaves.

Others of the same kind · Jia clan – Rongguo House Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 · Jia Yuanchun 贾元春 · 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 Jia Yuanchun 贾元春 · Li Wan 李纨 · Li Wen 李纹 · Jia Huan 贾环 · Zhao Yiniang 赵姨娘 · Zhou Yiniang 周姨娘 · Shishu 侍书 · Cuimo 翠墨 · Xiaochan 小蝉 · Wang Shanbao jia de 王善保家的 · Wu Xindeng xifu 吴新登媳妇 · He Po 何婆 and 5 more

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