Wang Ye Guan Shi

Their Story

Not a person. The four characters name a class — princes and the officials around them — and no individual is identified on the sheet. 官史 is not a title the novel uses; its nearest words are 官客, the gentlemen guests a great house entertains, and 长史官, the officer who runs a princely establishment.

Rank arrives in force three times in the book. In Chapter 14, four princely houses — 东平, 南安, 西宁, 北静 — pitch roadside sacrifice tents along the route of Qin Keqing’s funeral, and the young Prince of Beijing orders his officers to wait there while the cortège passes; behind them come the dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts and barons, listed by name and inherited rank for half a page. In Chapter 71 the Ningguo mansion is given over entirely to the 官客 for Grandmother Jia’s eightieth birthday, while the women are received next door. In Chapter 105 officialdom comes back through the same gates to seal the rooms and carry out the deed-boxes.

The same faces at the funeral, the banquet and the confiscation. The novel is precise about that.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Dozens of men packed into one sheet and receding into a blue-green wash, black gauze caps and gold coronets thinning to dabs at the top. Robes in coral, ochre, violet, celadon; rank badges worked in gold. At the bottom right, seen from behind, a broad figure in red with a jewelled belt takes up a quarter of the paper and blocks the view. She paints the class as a mass with its back turned, and gives the front rank the only faces.

The Calligraphy

王爷官史, four characters down the lower left, in a heavier and more upright hand than the young women’s sheets receive. It is a designation rather than a name — an office and a rank standing in for every man in the crowd.

Connections

• 北静王水溶 — the prince who sets up the roadside sacrifice in Chapter 14 and posts his officers to attend it.
• 贾珍 Jia Zhen — host of the Ningguo funeral, and of the male guests at Chapter 71.
• 贾政 Jia Zheng — who receives officials at his own door, welcome and unwelcome.
• 贾元春 Jia Yuanchun — whose position at court is the reason such men come at all.

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