Nüwa

Her Story

Everything before Chapter 1. The creator-goddess smelts 36,501 blocks of stone to repair the fallen vault of heaven, and uses 36,500. The one left over is abandoned at the foot of Greensickness Peak 青埂峰, where it refines itself into sentience and grieves at being the only stone found unfit. That rejected stone is the jade Baoyu is born with, and the surface on which the whole book is said to be inscribed. She never appears again.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Two sheets sharing nothing but the name. In one she is seen from behind, arms stretched into a dark stone overhang, robe off one shoulder, light falling in rays — the repair itself, mid-gesture. The other abandons the body: red fronds, a blue-flecked black peak, a face tipped back in a grey vortex.

The Calligraphy

Both sheets are inscribed 女娲, the goddess’s bare name with no title, honorific or epithet attached.

Connections

• The Stone / Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — the block she rejected, which becomes his jade and the novel itself.
• The scabby-headed monk 癞头和尚 — who finds the stone at Greensickness Peak and carries it into the world.
• The lame Taoist 跛足道人 — his companion in that first scene.

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