Qingwen

Her Story

She was bought as a child by the household of Lai Da, the Jia family’s chief steward. She was about ten, and she could not remember her parents or where she came from. Old Mrs Lai used to bring her along on visits to the Rong mansion; Grandmother Jia liked her quickness and her looks, and the Lais made a present of her. Grandmother Jia passed her on to Baoyu. Qingwen arrived at Green Delights 怡红院 as a gift twice over, handed up and handed down, and that fact sits underneath everything that happens to her.

She was the finest needlewoman in the house and the most beautiful of the maids, and she was careless of what beauty was supposed to buy. She talked back. In Chapter 31 she breaks a fan, is scolded for clumsiness, and answers so sharply that Baoyu says she should be sent away — at which she weeps and refuses to go. In the same scene she mocks Xiren in front of everyone for having slept with their master and gained no title by it. That evening Baoyu hands her his own fan and tells her to tear it if tearing amuses her. She tears it, then takes Sheyue’s and tears that too, and they all laugh. The chapter title turns it into a proverb: 撕扇子作千金一笑 — tearing fans for a smile worth a thousand gold.

Chapter 51: Xiren has gone home because her mother is dying, and Qingwen, on night duty, runs out into the snow in a thin jacket to frighten Sheyue. She catches the chill that never quite leaves her. Chapter 52 is her great scene. Grandmother Jia gives Baoyu a cape woven with peacock-feather gold thread; he burns a hole in it the first time he wears it, and no tailor or embroiderer outside the house will attempt the repair. Qingwen, running a fever, recognises the weave, has the frame brought to her bed, and darns it through the night, resting between rows because her head swims, finishing at dawn and collapsing. The chapter calls her 勇 — brave. It is the only word of praise the novel gives her that is not about her face.

Chapter 74 destroys her. Wang Shanbao’s wife tells Lady Wang there is a maid at Green Delights who looks like Xi Shi and gives herself airs. Lady Wang has her summoned, sees her ill and beautiful, and dislikes her on sight. When the search party reaches Green Delights that night, Qingwen comes in with her hair loose, throws the lid off her own box, takes it by the bottom and empties it upside down onto the floor — 两手捉着底子，朝天往地下尽情一倒. There is nothing in it. The gesture is the offence.

In Chapter 77 Lady Wang has her carried out of the gates, four or five days into a fever, without her own clothes, and sent to her only living relative — a cousin called Duo Hunchong, a drunk, whose wife is the most notorious woman attached to the household. Baoyu finds her on a bare board bed. She asks for tea; what arrives is bitter and greasy in a cracked pot, and she drinks it as though it were nectar. She cuts off at the root the two long nails she had grown and gives them to him, and exchanges her old red undergarment for his shirt so that something of her will still be near him. Then she says the thing that undoes her whole story: she is dying for a reputation she never earned. She and Baoyu had never been lovers. Had she known she would be killed for it, she says, she would have behaved otherwise. She dies that night, sixteen years old.

In Chapter 78 a little maid tells Baoyu that Qingwen said she was not dying — that heaven was short a flower spirit and the Jade Emperor had appointed her. Pressed on which flower, the girl says hibiscus. Baoyu writes the Elegy for the Hibiscus Maid 芙蓉女儿诔 and reads it aloud to the flowers.

Her page is the first in the Third Register, and the picture on it is not a picture: 又非人物，也无山水，不过是水墨滃染的满纸乌云浊雾 — no figure, no landscape, only a page of black cloud and dirty mist blotted in ink. The verse beneath reads 霁月难逢，彩云易散。心比天高，身为下贱。风流灵巧招人怨。寿夭多因 毁谤生，多情公子空牵念。 A heart higher than the sky, a body born to servitude. Early death comes most often out of slander.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Three versions, and two of them are about the fan. In the first she stands in a vermilion jacket over a white skirt, both hands laid along the top edge of a wide-open folding fan whose leaf is covered in small black script; gold blossoms spray from her hair, and the ground behind her is a grey wash stamped all over with pink petal shapes. She is smiling. The fan is whole. In the second the figure is frontal and colder — long straight brows, a heavy black sash knotted at the waist, a black train dragging off to the right — and the fan she holds up has lost its leaf: only the splayed white ribs are left, and her left hand has come free of them. Between the two paintings the fan is destroyed. The third declines the fan altogether. She is in profile, head bowed, eyes closed, a gauze veil over her hair, in a deep blue robe scattered with white blossoms, against bare grey branches and a few ochre flecks on empty paper. It is the sickroom picture, and the only one of the three in which she looks at nobody.

The Calligraphy

晴雯 on all three sheets — the two characters of the personal name alone, no surname, no household, no title. She has none to give: the novel records no family for her beyond a cousin she barely knew. The name is the whole of what she owns, and the Chapter 5 verse is built out of it — 霁月, clear moon, for 晴; 彩云, bright cloud, for 雯. On the first sheet the characters stand upright beside her; on the second and third they loosen into a fast running hand.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her master at Green Delights, who never took her as a lover and mourned her as a goddess.
• Xiren 袭人 — the other named maid of the Third Register and her opposite in every respect; Qingwen mocked her openly.
• Lady Wang 王夫人 — Baoyu’s mother, who believed the slander against her and expelled her from the house to die.
• Sheyue 麝月 — fellow maid at Green Delights, present at the fan-tearing and at the night in the snow.
• Grandmother Jia 贾母 — received her as a gift from the Lai household and gave her to Baoyu.

Others of the same kind · maid – Baoyu (Green Delights / 怡紅院) Xiren 袭人 · Sheyue 麝月 · Xiaohong 小红 · Qiuwen 秋纹 · Bihen 碧痕 · Tanyun 檀云 · Qixian 绮霰 · Qianxue 茜雪 · Huixiang 蕙香 · Jiahui 佳蕙 · Zhui'er 坠儿 · Liang'er 良儿 · Chunyan 春燕 · Liu Wu'er 柳五儿 and 1 more

Named on these pages Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 · Wang Furen 王夫人 · Xiren 袭人 · Sheyue 麝月 · Qiuwen 秋纹 · Bihen 碧痕 · Qixian 绮霰 · Huixiang 蕙香 · Zhui'er 坠儿 · Song Mama 宋嬷嬷 · Duo Guniang 多姑娘 · Zhui'er de niang 坠儿的娘 and 2 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