Shi Xiangyun

Her Story

She is the most cheerful orphan in Chinese literature. Her parents died while she was still in swaddling clothes; she is a grand-niece of Jia Mu, brought up in the house of the Marquis of Baoling by uncles, and everyone in the Prospect Garden assumes she has the easier life because she is not a dependent of the Jia. She lets them think it. Only in passing does the novel let slip that in her uncles’ house the ladies do their own needlework, and that Xiangyun sits over it until midnight.

Her prophecy in Chapter 5 gives her a picture with no people in it at all — a few streaks of flying cloud, a bend of water running away — over the verse 「富贵又何为，襁褓之间父母违。展眼吊斜晖，湘江水逝楚云飞。」 What use was the wealth, when in swaddling clothes she lost both parents; a glance, and she is mourning the slanting light; the waters of the Xiang run away and the clouds of Chu fly off. Her own name is inside her fate: 湘 the river, 云 the cloud.

She arrives in Chapter 20 and the room changes temperature. She has a speech defect — she cannot manage the sound of 二, so 「二哥哥」 comes out as 「爱哥哥」, love-brother — and Daiyu mocks it immediately. Xiangyun does not take offence and does not back down; she wishes Daiyu a lisping husband, and everyone laughs, and that is the register the two of them keep for the rest of the book. In Chapter 31 she is wearing a golden qilin, and Baoyu happens to have picked up a larger one at a temple; the chapter title itself, 因麒麟伏白首双星, plants a hint about the two of them that the surviving text never explains. In Chapter 32 she urges Baoyu to think about a career and official advancement, and he cuts her off in front of everyone. She is on the wrong side of the novel’s central argument and entirely unbothered by it.

She is a real poet. In Chapter 37 she joins the Crab-flower Club late, immediately writes two poems on the crab-flower rather than one, and offers to host the next meeting; Baochai quietly pays for the crabs so that Xiangyun, who has no money of her own, is not shamed. She takes the sobriquet 枕霞旧友, Old Friend of the Pillowed Rosy Cloud, after a pavilion in her family’s old garden — a name that reaches back past her parents’ deaths to a house she can barely remember. At the chrysanthemum contest in Chapter 38 Daiyu carries off the crown, but Xiangyun’s poems are in the top rank. In Chapter 49, in the snow, she wears a great fur borrowed from Jia Mu and roasts venison over a brazier with Baoyu while Daiyu laughs at them, and delivers the line that is her whole philosophy: 「是真名士自风流」 — the genuine article is free by nature, and the rest of you are counterfeit refinement.

Chapter 62 is her scene, and one of the most loved in the book. It is Baoyu’s birthday; Xiangyun drinks too much at the party and disappears. They find her on a stone bench in a quiet corner of the rockery, deeply asleep, peony petals blown all over her — head, face, the front of her dress — with a bundle of petals wrapped in a silk handkerchief under her cheek for a pillow, her fan fallen on the ground and half buried in fallen blossom, and a swarm of bees and butterflies circling her. In her sleep she is still reciting the drinking-game verses: 「泉香而酒冽，玉碗盛来琥珀光……」

In Chapter 76, on the mid-autumn night, she takes Daiyu out to the Concave Crystal Pavilion by the water because the family banquet has turned melancholy, and the two of them cap verses in the dark. A crane goes up off the pond and Xiangyun gives 「寒塘渡鹤影」 — the shadow of a crane crossing the cold pool. Daiyu answers 「冷月葬花魂」, the cold moon burying the soul of the flowers, and Xiangyun tells her the line is too bleak. Miaoyu, who has been listening from the shadows, brings them both indoors and finishes the poem for them.

The end is given quickly and without ceremony. In Chapter 109 the family hears that Xiangyun’s husband, whom she had married well, has been struck down by a sudden wasting illness. She is widowed young. Of all the Twelve Beauties she was the one who seemed constitutionally incapable of being destroyed, and her song among the Twelve says the same thing twice: the clouds scatter, the river runs dry, this is the ordinary rise and fall of the dusty world, so why grieve over it.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She paints Chapter 62 and follows the text almost item by item. Xiangyun is half-lying against a broad pale slab — the stone bench, given as two or three flat washes of pink-grey — one arm flung up and back behind her head, the other trailing, her orange-red robe pouring off the bench in wide wet strokes with a blue-grey lining. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth is faintly open, which is the artist’s way of keeping the mumbled drinking verses in the picture. White peonies and green leaves are tucked into her hair on one side and red ones on the other. Behind her the garden dissolves entirely into a wash of pink and coral blossom with no drawn edges at all.

At her feet, exactly as written, the round fan lies on the ground among scattered petals, its face a single dark ink stain. What Xiang Li declines is the bees and butterflies, which every popular version of this scene includes. Removing them removes the comedy. What is left is a young woman asleep in falling flowers, which is what the scene has always secretly been.

The Calligraphy

史湘云, in a vertical column down the left margin — surname and given name together, all three characters, unlike the 探春 and 妙玉 sheets that stand beside it. The full name is correct and slightly formal. She is a Shi, not a Jia: a guest in the household rather than a daughter of it. And the surname that fixes her to another family is the same character that opens the river in her prophecy.

Connections

• Jia Mu 贾母 — her great-aunt, and the reason she is at the Rongguo house at all.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her childhood companion, roasting-venison accomplice, and the person she most reliably argues with.
• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — who mocks her lisp in Chapter 20 and caps her verse in the dark in Chapter 76.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — who pays for Xiangyun’s poetry party in Chapter 37 without letting her feel the charity.
• Miaoyu 妙玉 — who overhears the mid-autumn linked verse and completes it.
• Cuilü 翠缕 — her maid, and the audience for her lecture on yin and yang in Chapter 31.

Others of the same kind · Shi family Shi Ding 史鼎

Named on these pages Miaoyu 妙玉 · Xue Baoqin 薛宝琴 · Shi Ding 史鼎 · Cuilü 翠缕 · Kuiguan 葵官 · Zhou Nai Ma 周奶妈 · Xiaochou 小丑

The Speaking Portrait

Xiang Li’s painting, animated and given a voice. Press play.

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