Jiangzhu Xiancao

Her Story

She is Daiyu before Daiyu, and she is not a woman but a plant. She stands outside the mortal roster because her entire existence precedes the novel’s first mortal scene.

Chapter 1 gives her origin in one line: 「西方灵河岸上三生石畔有绛珠草一株」 — on the bank of the Sacred River in the west, beside the Rock of Three Incarnations, there grew a single stalk of Crimson Pearl grass. The attendant of the Court of Sunset Glow, 神瑛侍者, watered it every day with sweet dew, and only because of that did it survive. Fed then by the essence of heaven and earth, it shed its vegetable husk, changed into human form, and became the Crimson Pearl Fairy — roaming beyond the Heaven of Parting Sorrow, eating the Fruit of Secret Passion when hungry, drinking the water of the Sea of Sorrow when thirsty. She carries an unrepaid kindness and cannot digest it.

When she learns that the attendant means to go down into the mortal world, she makes the vow that is the novel: 「他是甘露之惠，我并无此水可还。他既下世为人，我也去下世为人，但把我一生所有的眼泪还他，也偿还得过他了。」 His was the kindness of sweet dew; she has no such water with which to return it; since he goes down to be a man, she will go down too, and repay him with all the tears of one lifetime. Everything Daiyu does in the next hundred and twenty chapters is that payment, and she dies when the account closes.

The Chapter 5 song 《枉凝眉》 names the pair as they were: 「一个是阆苑仙葩，一个是美玉无瑕。」 One a fairy flower of the immortal garden, one flawless jade. And it asks how many tears an eye can hold — 「想眼中能有多少泪珠儿，怎经得秋流到冬尽，春流到夏！」

In Xiang Li's Hands

She does not paint a plant. She paints the transformation. A woman is flung backward through pale blue air, throat exposed, eyes shut, white blossom in the loosened black hair, and her body is still half vegetable — the whole lower figure breaks into green leaf-strokes that read as foliage and as skirt at once. Robes unfurl below her in long black ink arcs with nothing under them. The upflung right hand holds one small red bead at the fingertips. That is the crimson pearl of her name; it is also exactly the size and shape of a tear.

The Calligraphy

The inscription reads 绛珠仙子 — Crimson Pearl Fairy — not 绛珠仙草, the grass under which she is catalogued. Four characters at the top left, unusually high on the sheet, above the falling figure rather than beside her. Choosing the transformed name over the botanical one settles what the painting is of: not the stalk on the riverbank, but the being it became, at the instant it stopped being a plant.

Connections

• Shenying Shizhe 神瑛侍者 — who watered her with sweet dew, and to whom she vowed a lifetime of tears in repayment.
• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — her incarnation in the mortal world, who weeps the debt out and dies when it is paid.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — the attendant come down as a man; the debt is owed to him.
• Jing Huan 警幻仙姑 — the Fairy Disenchantment, in whose Land of Illusion Daiyu’s fate is registered.
• Zhen Shiyin 甄士隐 — who overhears the monk and the Taoist recounting the tear-debt in Chapter 1.

Others of the same kind · mythic frame / immortal Kongkong Daoren 空空道人 · Jinghuan Xiangu 警幻仙姑 · Zhongqing Dashi 钟情大士 · Yinchou Jinnü 引愁金女 · Duhen Puti 度恨菩提 · Shenying Shizhe 神瑛侍者

Named on these pages Shenying Shizhe 神瑛侍者

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