The Unnamed

Thirty-two of the 413 paintings carry no personal name. Where every other sheet in the collection has two or three characters naming somebody — 黛玉, 晴雯, 坠儿 — these have an occupation. 小丫头, little maid. 宫女, palace woman. 仆人, servant. 舞女, dancer. Nine designations in all; the largest of them accounts for fourteen sheets.

This is not a gap in the artist’s research. It is the novel’s own bookkeeping, copied faithfully. Cao Xueqin names an extraordinary number of people, and then below a certain rank he stops, openly. In Chapter 36 Wang Xifeng recites the monthly wages of Baoyu’s rooms: 晴雯麝月等七个大丫头，每月人各月钱一吊，佳蕙等 八个小丫头，每月人各月钱五百 — seven senior maids at a string of cash a month, Qingwen and Sheyue among them; eight little maids at five hundred, of whom exactly one, Jiahui, is named. That 等 — “and the others” — is the address these thirty-two sheets live at.

小丫头 appears in eighty of the novel’s hundred and twenty chapters. No named character comes close. They sit in the covered porch saying nothing, listening for a call (Ch. 7). Four of them stand beside Grandmother Jia’s couch holding fly-whisks and rinse-bowls, their hair not yet grown out (Ch. 42). They wait in a row outside Xifeng’s door holding their breath (Ch. 67). They are the most frequent person in the book and the least particular.

The line between them and a name is thinner than it looks. Chapter 77 mentions in passing that Qingwen was bought by the Lai family at ten years old, 尚未留头, hair not yet grown long, and became one of the novel’s great figures only because Grandmother Jia happened to notice her face. Every named maid in this collection was, a few years earlier, one of these.

What Xiang Li did with that is the reason for this page. She gave them the whole apparatus: same paper, same scale, same full-length figure, the same seal, the designation brushed in the same hand and the same position where a name would go. And then she refused to paint them as a type. The fourteen 小丫头 are fourteen different girls — two of them small children, one nearly grown — with different faces, hair, seasons and rooms. Nothing required this. A project of 413 sheets could have run variations on one figure through the unnamed and no one would have audited it.

Said once, plainly, as interpretation: the choice reads as an argument. The novel’s ledger says these people are interchangeable. The sheets say they were not. She is not sentimental about it either — she also declines to paint most of them working.

小丫头 Xiao Ya Tou · 14 sheets

The lowest rank of maid in the household, and the youngest: the word itself comes from 丫, the forked double bun a young girl’s hair was tied into. Their work is fetching, waiting, carrying messages, holding the curtain, pouring tea. The fourteen sheets are fourteen distinct people. Two are unmistakably small children — one sits under a fruiting branch with a chick in her hand and two more at her feet, one kneels holding a lotus-shaped lantern on a stick, and both have the round face and blunt fringe of an eight-year-old. Others are adolescent, and one, standing before a wall-painting of lions with kingfisher ornaments in her hair, looks nearly grown. Their settings vary as much: three sheets place the figure against a background left as bare outline drawing — peonies, willow, Buddhist figures on lotus thrones — while others are fully painted marsh, pine, a white peacock in display, a moonlit swirl of green. Ages, faces, hands and backgrounds all differ. Only one of the fourteen is plainly at work: a girl in profile lifting a tray with both hands.

宫女 Gong Nü · 6 sheets

Palace women. The word appears only in the last forty chapters — Chapter 83, when the family is admitted to see the ailing Yuanchun and two small palace maids relay the order that ceremony is to be skipped, and another carries in the list of names that makes her weep; and Chapter 116, where Baoyu, back in the dream realm, sees palace women half-hidden among the towers. Yuanchun’s visit home in Chapter 18 does not use the word; there the attendants have ranked titles, 昭容 and 彩嫔.

Each of the six sheets gives the woman an object and no person to give it to: a tasselled palace lantern on a red pole, a red coral tree on a dish, a single lotus, a large green fan on a long handle, a gilt ruyi sceptre. The sixth carries nothing and stands before a palace roof under a sky full of birds. One of the six is painted entirely from behind — the only sheet in these thirty-two that withholds the face.

仆人 Pu Ren · 1 sheet

The plainest word for servant, and in the novel a category rather than a person: Chapter 30’s 各处主仆人等, masters and servants alike, dozing through a hot afternoon. This is the only one of the thirty-two sheets that is not a portrait. Eight or nine figures crowd it — a bowed young maid in front with a stack of folded clothes in red, orange and blue, a woman in mauve with her hands over her belly, an old bald man, a woman drawing on a long-stemmed pipe, a wide round yellow fan carried at the back. A singular inscription on a plural picture.

老苍头 Lao Cang Tou · 1 sheet

苍头 is an old male house-servant, named for the dark blue-green cloth such men wound round their heads. The phrase occurs once in the novel: in Chapter 48 Xue Pan sets out on a trading journey with a party of six that includes 薛蟠之乳父老 苍头一名, one old servant, the husband of his wet-nurse. He gets no other line. The sheet gives him the 苍 of his designation as a teal head-wrap with a jade square at the brow, a grey beard, a black robe, and a kneeling posture behind a large round patterned object, banded pastel current running behind him.

舞女 Wu Nü · 6 sheets

The word occurs exactly once in the novel, in Chapter 5: in the Land of Illusion, 又有十二个舞女上来，请问演何调曲 — twelve dancing girls come forward and ask what they are to perform. Disenchantment tells them to sing the newly written twelve songs of Dream of the Red Chamber, and they 轻敲檀板，款按银筝, lightly strike the sandalwood clappers and gently press the silver zither. The only dancers in the book are the ones who sing the heroines’ fates before the novel has begun.

The six sheets are the only ones of these thirty-two that leave the ground. Each pairs a fully coloured figure with a paler, ghosted second figure above or behind her, in the flying-apsara idiom of the Dunhuang caves: a long zither, a pipa held sideways in falling petals, a moon-lute, a waist drum seen from behind, panpipes and a vertical harp in the upper register. Two of them hold precisely what Chapter 5 names — a pair of dark red wooden clappers, and the long zither. One sheet carries a date.

小道士 Xiao Dao Shi · 1 sheet

Twelve small Taoists were bought to staff the Garden’s temples (Ch. 23). The one who gets a scene is in Chapter 29: at the Qingxu Temple a boy of twelve or thirteen trimming candle-wicks fails to get clear in time and runs headlong into Wang Xifeng, who backhands him across the face. The crowd shouts 拿，拿，拿！打， 打，打！ Grandmother Jia stops it — bring the child here, don’t frighten him — and he kneels shaking, still holding the shears, unable to say his age. The sheet paints the fear and nothing else: black robes in wet ink, a pale sash flying sideways, eyes wide open.

女先儿 Nü Xian Er · 1 sheet

Professional women storytellers, hired in for feasts. In Chapter 54 two of them are seated on stools at the New Year’s party and handed the 弦子 and the 琵琶; they begin a tale whose young hero is named Wang Xifeng, and Grandmother Jia then takes the whole genre apart in front of them. Later that night they beat the drum for the passing of the plum branch, and the little maids cough as a signal so it stops on Xifeng. The sheet hands her the instrument the text does: a pipa upright against pale green robes, a plectrum raised, eyes lowered.

姑苏驾娘 Gu Su Jia Niang · 1 sheet

Boat-women brought north from Suzhou to work the Garden’s water. Chapter 40: 那姑苏选来的几个驾娘早把两只棠木舫撑来 — the boat-women chosen from Suzhou have already poled two crab-apple-wood barges to the landing for Grandmother Jia’s outing with Granny Liu, and Xifeng, showing off, takes a pole, feels the boat lurch and hands it straight back. In Chapter 58 they are dredging mud and planting lotus. The sheet gives her the pole at a long diagonal, a wide green-and-yellow hat, red streamers snapping behind. Four characters, the longest inscription here, and the only one that says where the person came from.

娈童 Luan Tong · 1 sheet

A boy kept for the sexual use of grown men. The word occurs once, in Chapter 75, at Jia Zhen’s night gambling, where no server is over fifteen: 其中有两个十六七 岁娈童以备奉酒的，都打扮的粉妆玉琢 — two boys of sixteen or seventeen kept to pour the wine, powdered and dressed up. Xue Pan pulls one onto his lap; when they favour the winners, Xing Dequan 邢德全 swears at them. The novel does not soften this. The sheet takes the one duty the text names: an ewer tipped in the raised hand, a cup in the other, top-knots tied with red. No room, no table, no men.

What the sheets hold

Every inscription here is brushed in full character forms — 小丫頭, 老蒼頭, 姑蘇駕娘 — set upper left or upper right, exactly as the named sheets are set. The designation is given the dignity of a name and the position of one, which is as close as this collection comes to stating its own case. Nothing else about these thirty-two is recoverable. The paintings were destroyed; the photographs taken around 2012 are all that is left of them, as they are of the other 381. Whoever these people were meant to be, the record now is a girl with a chick, a boy with a wine ewer, and a woman in a hat holding a pole.

Named, and 小丫头 by rank Jiahui 佳蕙 · Zhui'er 坠儿 · Zhen'er 臻儿 · Cai'er 彩儿

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