Lin Ruhai

His Story

Chapter 2 gives him in a paragraph of offices and arithmetic. Third in the palace examination — 前科的探花 — risen to 兰台寺大夫, then imperially appointed Salt Commissioner at Yangzhou. His ancestors held a marquisate granted for three generations and extended by favour to a fourth, his father’s; by his own turn the title was spent and he went in through the examinations instead. The line is thin — 支庶不盛. He is forty. His only son died the year before, aged three. His wife, Jia Min 贾敏, sister of Jia She and Jia Zheng, dies in this chapter; the chapter title says so before he does. What is left is one girl of five, 乳名黛玉.

He hires the dismissed prefect Jia Yucun to teach her and takes almost no notice of him. When Grandmother Jia sends for the child, he lets her go, and his reasoning is the only speech the novel gives him: he is 年将半百 and will not remarry, and the girl has no mother above her and no brother or sister beside her. In the same breath he writes to Jia Zheng recommending Yucun — a letter that puts a corrupt man back into office and sends him to Jinling in time to try the Feng Yuan case.

Chapter 12 brings word that he is gravely ill, and Jia Lian escorts Daiyu home. In Chapter 14 the servant Zhaoer returns with the sentence 林姑老爷是九月初三日巳时没的. By Chapter 16 he is in the ancestral ground and the affairs are settled; what became of the Lin money the novel never says, and readers have argued about it for two centuries.

He has four chapters. His death is the hinge of the book: it turns a visiting granddaughter into an orphan who cannot go home.

In Xiang Li's Hands

An official in full costume: black winged cap, blue-grey robe over pale underrobe, a rank badge worked in red, green and white at the chest, moustache and spade beard. The face is mild, the eyes nearly shut. His raised right hand grips a black, lumpy, pitted mass — an inkstone or a scholar’s rock; the photograph will not settle which. A vast pale sleeve swings out below. Compare Jia Yucun’s sheet: the same cap, the same badge, the same swinging sleeve. She paints the two men as a pair and lets the objects in their hands do the arguing.

The Calligraphy

林如海 down the upper right — surname plus courtesy name. His registered personal name is 海; 如海 is the style, and it is the only form the novel ever uses, the way a colleague or a correspondent would address him. Three characters in a dry, upright, well-spaced hand, set high and clear of the figure, unlike the wet running script the young women’s sheets receive.

Connections

• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — his only surviving child, sent north to her grandmother’s house in Chapter 3 and orphaned there in Chapter 14.
• Jia Min 贾敏 — his wife, Grandmother Jia’s daughter, whose death in Chapter 2 sets the whole novel moving.
• Jia Yucun 贾雨村 — hired as his daughter’s tutor and recommended by his letter into the office he then abuses.
• Jia Mu 贾母 — his mother-in-law, who sends for Daiyu and keeps her.
• Jia Lian 贾琏 — his wife’s nephew, who escorts Daiyu back to Yangzhou and settles the estate after the funeral.

Others of the same kind · Lin family Lin Daiyu 林黛玉

Named on these pages Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 · Jia Yucun 贾雨村 · Jia Min 贾敏 · Zhang Rugui 张如圭

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