Jinghuan Xiangu

Her Story

She stands outside the mortal roster because she is the officer who keeps it. She introduces herself in Chapter 5 with an address and a brief: 「吾居离恨天之上， 灌愁海之中，乃放春山遣香洞太虚幻境警幻仙姑是也：司人间之风情月债，掌尘世之女怨 男痴。」 She lives above the Heaven of Parting Sorrow and in the Sea of Brimming Grief, in the Land of Illusion; her charge is the romantic debts of the world and the grievances of its women and the folly of its men.

Baoyu falls asleep in Qin Keqing’s room and follows her in. She takes him to a hall of cabinets labelled by province and lets him open the one marked 金陵十二钗 — the Twelve Beauties of Jinling, main register, supplementary, and third. He turns over pictures and verses he cannot read: every girl he knows, and how each one ends. She serves him tea called 千红一窟, a thousand reds in one cave, and wine called 万艳同杯, ten thousand beauties in one cup, and twelve dancers perform the twelve songs of A Dream of Red Mansions.

None of it is hospitality. She had been asked. The spirits of the two founding dukes of Ning and Rong met her and begged her to frighten this boy onto a straight road. When the registers and the songs fail, she tries the last thing available: she marries him to her own sister, 「乳名兼美字可卿者」, and instructs him. She calls him 「天下古今第一淫人」 and then redefines the word — what he has is 意淫, 「惟心会而不可口传」, met in the mind and not passed in speech.

That fails too. Walking out the next morning they come to the Ford of Error, 「深 有万丈，遥亘千里，中无舟楫可通」 — ten thousand fathoms deep, a thousand li across, no boat. Demons drag him in and he wakes screaming. The warning has been delivered in full and understood by nobody.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Two sheets, and they disagree about what she is. In the first she is airborne in the Dunhuang manner against a slate-blue wash — jewelled crown, beaded collar, scarves whipping, one arm thrown out of the frame — with a stack of gold-covered albums balanced on her palm and tilted up against her cheek, white page-edges ruled in, her eyes closed. She is carrying the registers like a child. In the second she kneels, still, in pale green, chin lifted, gaze up and away, one hand open beside a magnolia; behind her a concentric aureole runs from white through yellow and rose into violet. Her hands are empty. Between the two she stops being an official and becomes a goddess.

The Calligraphy

The two sheets do not agree here either: one reads 警幻仙子, the other 警幻仙姑. Both belong to her — Chapter 5 alternates 仙子 and 仙姑, and the rhapsody in that chapter is titled 《警幻仙姑赋》 — so the inscriptions are recording a variation in the novel rather than making one. What neither gives is a name: 警幻 is a job description, to warn of illusion, and it is the only thing she is ever called.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — whom she was asked to warn, and could not.
• Qin Keqing 秦可卿 — her sister in the Land of Illusion bears the name 可卿, the double of the woman in whose room Baoyu is dreaming.
• Shenying Shizhe 神瑛侍者 — who registered with her before descending into the mortal world.
• The Twelve Beauties 金陵十二钗 — the three registers of their fates are kept in her cabinets and read by Baoyu in Chapter 5.
• Zhen Shiyin 甄士隐 — who saw the gateway of her Land of Illusion in his own dream in Chapter 1.

Others of the same kind · mythic frame / immortal Kongkong Daoren 空空道人 · Zhongqing Dashi 钟情大士 · Yinchou Jinnü 引愁金女 · Duhen Puti 度恨菩提 · Shenying Shizhe 神瑛侍者 · Jiangzhu Xiancao 绛珠仙草

Named on these pages Zhongqing Dashi 钟情大士 · Yinchou Jinnü 引愁金女 · Duhen Puti 度恨菩提 · Shenying Shizhe 神瑛侍者 · Jiangzhu Xiancao 绛珠仙草

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