Linchang Bo

His Story

A peerage, present in the novel only through his wife’s rank.

Chapter 71 is Grandmother Jia’s eightieth birthday, kept over eight days at both houses. The twenty-eighth of the seventh month is the grandest: royal kin, princes, consorts. Inside the Rong mansion the seating is set out precisely — the two head tables for the Princess Dowager of Nan’an and the Consort of Beijing, then the ranked ladies of the dukes and marquises, and at the lower left-hand table two companion guests, 锦乡侯诰命与临昌伯诰命: the titled lady of the Marquis of Jinxiang and the titled lady of the Earl of Linchang.

That is the whole appearance. The Earl of Linchang himself is never in the room. What the novel records is a place setting and a rank, and no personal name for either woman or man.

In Xiang Li's Hands

An old man with a bare crown and a white beard, in a white robe with blue lining and a purple headcloth flying behind, lifting a green bronze vessel in a lotus-shaped bowl to the light and looking down at it. Behind him, shelves of curios — a lidded jar with a lion finial, framed jades, a censer on a draped stand. She declines the banquet entirely, and paints the title as a collector at home among his own things.

The Calligraphy

临昌伯, three characters down the far upper right, over the painted shelving — the peerage and nothing else, since a personal name is the one thing the novel never supplies him.

Connections

• Grandmother Jia 贾母 — at whose eightieth birthday the title is entered in
• the seating.
• The titled lady of the Marquis of Jinxiang 锦乡侯诰命 — seated with her at
• the same lower left-hand table.
• The Princess Dowager of Nan’an 南安太妃 — at the head table that day, and
• the guest Grandmother Jia takes most trouble over.

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