Wu Jinxiao

His Story

Bailiff of the Black Hill Village, one of the Ningguo house’s northern estates. In Chapter 53 he arrives for the New Year with the year’s tribute — game, grain, livestock, charcoal, silver — and Jia Zhen tells him it is short. Wu Jinxiao answers with drought, flood, hail, and a month on the road through snow. The scene is the novel’s plainest accounting: the ledger of what the estates actually produce, set against what the household spends.

In Xiang Li's Hands

The only sheet here with weather in it. He trudges through a blue-grey wash of snow and rock, hooded in white fur over olive robes, a blue lacquered chest on his back and dull-plum bundles roped around him. The whiskered face is small and cheerful. She paints the journey, not the reckoning.

The Calligraphy

The three characters of the full name run down the right margin above a cyclical date and the painter’s signature, set into the painted sky rather than onto bare paper.

Connections

• Jia Zhen 贾珍 — master of Ningguo, who receives the tribute and complains it is short.
• Jia Rong 贾蓉 — Jia Zhen’s son, present at the reckoning of the estate accounts.

Others of the same kind · steward / manager Lai Da 赖大 · Lai Er 赖二 · Lai Sheng 赖升 · Lai Shangrong 赖尚荣 · Lai Mama 赖嬷嬷 · Lin Zhixiao 林之孝 · Zhou Rui 周瑞 · Dai Liang 戴良 · Yu Lu 俞禄 · Wang Xin 王信 · Laiwang 来旺 · Jin Cai 金彩 · Jin Wenxiang 金文翔 · Jiao Da 焦大 and 8 more

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