Miaoyu

Her Story

She is the only woman in the Main Register who is not a relative, a servant or a bride of the Jia family, and the only one whose surname the novel never gives. 妙玉 is a dharma name. It is all she has.

Her history arrives second-hand in Chapter 18, reported by Lin Zhixiao’s wife while the household is preparing for Yuanchun’s visit. A Suzhou girl from a family of scholars and officials. Sickly from birth; her parents bought substitutes to enter religion on her behalf and none of it worked, so in the end the girl took vows herself, and recovered. She keeps her hair — 带发修行, a lay religious, tonsured in intention only. She is eighteen. Her parents are dead. She has two old nurses and one small maid, she is thoroughly literate, and, the report adds, she is very beautiful. She had come north following relics of Guanyin and palm-leaf scriptures. Wang Furen says to send her a written invitation rather than a summons, because a summons would be refused — and that single line establishes the whole of her social position. She moves into the Green Bower Hermitage inside the Prospect Garden, an aristocratic nun in an aristocratic garden, dependent on people she considers vulgar.

Chapter 41 is her chapter, and it is about tea. Jia Mu brings the party in after lunch; Miaoyu serves her Old Man’s Eyebrow tea in a small Chenghua polychrome covered cup, brewed with rainwater kept from the previous year. Then she plucks Baochai and Daiyu by the sleeve and takes them into a side room for the real thing — antique cups with collectors’ inscriptions, and water she gathered five years earlier from snow off plum blossoms at a temple near Suzhou, sealed in a jar and buried until that summer. Daiyu asks whether it is last year’s rainwater and is told she is a hopeless philistine who cannot even taste water; one cup is a taste, two is quenching thirst, three is drinking like an ox. Baoyu follows them in, and Miaoyu pours his tea into the green jade beaker she uses herself every day, which is a far louder statement than anything she says. Meanwhile the Chenghua cup that Granny Liu drank from is to be thrown away; Baoyu suggests giving it to the old woman to sell instead, and Miaoyu agrees on condition she never has to touch it, and has the ground where Granny Liu sat washed down with water.

The book returns to her at the garden’s best moments. In Chapter 50, in the snow, Baoyu is sent to beg a branch of red plum from her hermitage and comes back with it. In Chapter 63 she sends him a birthday card, on pink notepaper, signed 「槛外人妙玉恭肃遥叩芳辰」 — one who dwells outside the threshold, respectfully saluting your natal day from afar. Baoyu has no idea how to answer it and has to be coached by Xing Xiuyan, who was Miaoyu’s neighbour for ten years and learned her characters from her; she explains that Miaoyu is fond of the old line about iron thresholds and earthen dumplings, and that the correct reply is to sign himself one who dwells inside the threshold. In Chapter 76 she appears out of the dark by the water where Daiyu and Xiangyun are capping verses, tells them the poem has gone too desolate, takes them into the hermitage, warms them, and writes the remaining thirteen couplets herself.

Her prophecy in Chapter 5 is a single image: a fine piece of jade, lying in filth. 「欲洁何曾洁，云空未必空。可怜金玉质，终陷淖泥中。」 She wished to be clean and was never clean; she spoke of emptiness and was not empty; a pity, that substance of gold and jade, sunk in the end in mire. Her song among the Twelve is blunter still — the higher a person stands the more they are envied, the more fastidious they are the more the world dislikes them.

In Chapter 87 she and Baoyu pass the Bamboo Lodge and stop to listen to Daiyu playing the qin. Miaoyu hears the mode turn and says the music has gone too far and cannot hold. That night, sitting in meditation, she loses her footing internally — 走火入魔 — and has to be brought round. The disturbance is desire, and she is the last person in the book able to admit it.

In Chapter 112 robbers break into the mansion, see her through a window, and come back for her with drugged incense. She is carried over the wall on a soft ladder and driven out through the city gate toward the sea. The narrator then refuses to finish the sentence: whether she submitted to defilement, or died rather than submit, is unknown, and cannot be guessed at. Of all the Twelve Beauties, hers is the only fate the book will not look at directly.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Xiang Li paints the tea and nothing else. Miaoyu walks in strict profile, both hands raised to shoulder height, a small inlaid tray on her open palms — a bronze-brown teapot with a domed lid, a covered cup beside it. No hermitage, no snow, no plum, no discarded cup. The paper is otherwise empty.

The refusals are precise. No monastic cap, no shaved head, no kasaya: the hair is up in a glossy black coil, textually exact for a lay religious who keeps her hair. But she is given a gilt comb set with turquoise and coral, a jade earring and a jade bangle, none of them devotional. The robes are cream and mint green with a coral flash in the skirt, cut through by four or five enormous wet black strokes falling the full length of the figure like calligraphy laid over watercolour. Two coral ribbons float free on the left, attached to nothing.

Set beside the other two sheets — Tanchun crowded with pattern and haunted by a ghost crowd, Xiangyun lying in dissolved blossom — Miaoyu gets the emptiest paper of the three, and it reads as her fastidiousness reads: nothing is permitted to touch her.

The Calligraphy

妙玉, two large characters down the left in a loose, wet, almost seal-like hand. It looks like the personal-name-only convention used on the 探春 sheet, but it is not. 妙玉 is a religious name conferred at ordination, and the novel never records a surname or a lay given name for her. There is no more familiar form available. The inscription that appears to be intimate is in fact the only name she has, which is the sharpest thing anyone could write beside this figure.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — who is given her own everyday cup in Chapter 41 and her birthday card in Chapter 63, and who never understands what either means.
• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — whose taste in water she insults in Chapter 41 and whose qin playing unsettles her in Chapter 87.
• Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 — her neighbour of ten years in Suzhou, who learned to write from her and is the only person who can read her.
• Jia Mu 贾母 — the guest she serves first and most correctly, with last year’s rainwater.
• Liu Laolao 刘姥姥 — the peasant woman whose lips on a cup are enough to make her want the cup destroyed.
• Shi Xiangyun 史湘云 — whose mid-autumn linked verse with Daiyu she overhears and finishes in Chapter 76.

Others of the same kind · nun / monk / Taoist Jingxu 净虚 · Zhishan 智善 · Zhineng 智能 · Zhitong 智通 · Yuanxin 圆信 · Da Liao 大了 · Sekong 色空 · Qinxiang 沁香 · Hexian 鹤仙 · Ma Daopo 马道婆 · Zhang Daoshi 张道士 · Wang Yitie 王一贴

Named on these pages Shi Xiangyun 史湘云 · Jia Xichun 贾惜春 · Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 · Liu Laolao 刘姥姥

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