Jia Yuanchun

Her Story

She is the eldest daughter of Jia Zheng and Wang Furen, born on the first day of the first month, which is why she is called 元春 — first spring. Her three younger cousins and sisters are named 迎春, 探春, 惜春, and the four given names read aloud as 原应叹息: it should be sighed over. Cao Xueqin builds the joke into the family register before anything happens.

She is much older than her brother Jia Baoyu, and before she left the house she taught him to read. The novel is specific about it: she had him through several thousand characters before he was four, and although they were sister and brother, she treated him as a mother would. This is the reason her judgement carries weight in every decision made about him afterwards, including the last one.

She enters the palace as a 女史, a lady of letters — a working position, not a distinction. Then in Chapter 16, 贾元春才选凤藻宫, the news arrives that she has been advanced to Director of the Phoenix Splendour Palace 凤藻宫尚书 and further ennobled as Consort of Virtue 贤德妃. The house goes out of its mind with joy. Shortly afterwards the throne permits imperial consorts to visit their families, and the Jia begin building. The Prospect Garden 大观园 — the enclosed world in which the entire rest of the novel takes place, where the cousins write poetry and fall in love and are slowly destroyed — is built for one night’s visit by this woman.

The Visitation occupies Chapters 17 and 18. The garden is finished; Jia Zheng walks it with Baoyu and the family retainers, testing the boy on inscriptions for the halls and pavilions. On the fifteenth of the first month Yuanchun comes home after dark, by water and by palanquin, past lanterns hung in the trees and candles floating on the stream. The reunion is the most expensive scene in the book and one of the saddest. She holds her grandmother and her mother and cannot speak; when she does speak she says she has been sent to 「那不得见人的去处」 — that place where one cannot see people. She then renames the garden and its buildings, sets her sisters and Baoyu a poetry task, sits through the plays, and leaves before dawn. She does not come back.

Everything she does from the palace afterwards arrives as an object. In Chapter 22 she sends out lantern riddles for the family to solve at the New Year; hers is a firecracker — something that makes one enormous noise and is gone. Jia Zheng works through the riddles the children have written, understands that every one of them is an omen, and goes to bed frightened. The chapter title names it: 制灯迷贾政悲谶语. In Chapter 28 she sends festival gifts, and Baoyu’s set and Baochai’s set are identical while Daiyu’s is smaller. No letter accompanies them. The marriage has been decided in a palace by a woman who cannot come home to say so.

Her prophecy in Chapter 5 is the second page of the Main Register: a picture of a bow with a citron hanging from it — 弓 for 宫, the palace, and 橼 for 元 — above the verse 「二十年来辨是非，榴花开处照宫闱。三春争及初春景，虎兕相逢大梦归。」 Twenty years of telling right from wrong; pomegranate flowers lighting the women’s quarters of the palace; and then the tiger and the beast meeting, and the great dream ending. Her song among the Twelve is 恨无常, which begins 「喜荣华正好，恨无常又到」 — the glory was at its height, and impermanence arrived — and ends with her coming to her parents in a dream to tell them to withdraw from all of it while there is still time: 「须要退步抽身早」.

They do not. In Chapter 83 she falls ill; the family is summoned into the palace to see her. In Chapter 95, 因讹成实元妃薨逝, she dies. What dies with her is the family’s cover. She was the reason the Jia were untouchable, and within ten chapters the guard is at the gate of the Ningguo house with a warrant of confiscation. Her whole function in the novel is to be the source of a splendour that nobody could afford, including her.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Xiang Li paints the rank and refuses the occasion. There is no palanquin here, no lantern-lit water, no kneeling family — none of the Visitation that every illustrated edition reaches for. Yuanchun stands alone on bare paper, caught mid-turn, and behind her a long grey-green sash unrolls and coils into empty space with nothing to anchor it.

The crown does the work. It is enormous: gold filigree, blue-green cloisonné, and two long ropes of pearls and turquoise drops falling past her shoulder to below her waist. Under it the robes are layered heavily — ochre-brown outer coat with a black-green facing, red under-robe, blue pleated panel, a pale green skirt trailing off the bottom edge. Against all that mass the face is small, young and downcast, the mouth set. Both hands are drawn up against the collarbone, bare, fingers slightly curled, and they are the only unarmoured thing in the picture.

Compare the crown with the one Xiang Li gives Lin Daiyu in her 潇湘妃子 sheet. Daiyu wears a goddess’s headdress as a metaphor. Yuanchun wears the real thing, and the painting is heavier for it.

The Calligraphy

The inscription reads 元春 — the given name, with no surname and none of the titles the novel spends a chapter conferring: not 贤德妃, not 元妃, not 娘娘. Every other document in her life addresses the office. This one addresses the girl who taught her little brother his characters.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her younger brother, whom she taught to read and treated as a son, and whose marriage she signals from the palace in Chapter 28.
• Jia Zheng 贾政 — her father, who must kneel to his own daughter during the Visitation in Chapters 17–18.
• Wang Furen 王夫人 — her mother.
• Jia Mu 贾母 — her grandmother, the head of the house her elevation protects.
• Jia Tanchun 贾探春 — her half-sister, one of the three younger 春 sisters whose names complete 原应叹息.

Others of the same kind · Jia clan – Rongguo House Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 · 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 Wang Furen 王夫人 · Baoqin 抱琴 · Shanziye 山子野 · Xia Bingzhong 夏秉忠 · Cai Pin 彩嫔 · Wang Ye Guan Shi 王爷官史 · Huang Jin Li Shi 黄巾力士 · Tai Fei Gui Fei 太妃贵妃 · Zhaorong 昭容

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