Wen Miao Zhen Ren
文妙真人
“The Last Name Baoyu Is Given”
His Story
Chapter 119: Baoyu sits the examinations, places seventh, and never comes out of the hall. Chapter 120: at the Piling post-station, in sudden snow, Jia Zheng looks up from a letter and sees on the bow of the boat a man with a shaved head and bare feet in a crimson felt cloak, bowing four times to him. Before he can be answered, a monk and a Taoist take Baoyu between them — 俗缘已毕，还不快走, your worldly debt is paid, come away — and the three go singing off across the waste. Jia Zheng reports it at court, and the Emperor, told that Baoyu would not take an office, confers on him the Daoist style 文妙真人. It is the last name the novel gives him.
The site’s other page for this figure comes at him through the opera, where a monk narrates the story and is revealed at the end to be Baoyu. The novel reaches the same place by its own route: the title is Baoyu’s, granted after he has already walked away from it.
In Xiang Li's Hands
Shaved head, eyes lowered, the ghost of a smile. A crimson robe wraps him from one shoulder to the floor over white; one leg and one bare foot show through the opening. Behind him a flat grey wash, no ground line. The style is Daoist; what she paints is a monk, in the red of the felt cloak from the snow.
The Calligraphy
文妙真人 — not a name but a religious style conferred by an emperor, four characters brushed upper right, so the sheet records the man by the title he was given after he had stopped being available to receive it.
Connections
- Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — the man the title is conferred on, in Chapter 120.
- Jia Zheng 贾政 — his father, the last person to see him, bowed to in the snow at Piling.
- Laitou Heshang 癞头和尚 and Bozu Daoren 跛足道人 — the monk and Taoist who take him by the arms and lead him away.
- Kongkong Daoren 空空道人 — the Daoist of the frame who copies the stone’s record; a separate figure, and the other religious presence bracketing this ending.
- Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — the wife left behind when he walks out of the examination hall.
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
