Xue Baochai

Her Story

Xue Baochai arrives at the Rongguo mansion because of a killing. In Chapter 4 her brother Xue Pan 薛蟠 has a man beaten to death in a quarrel over the purchase of a girl, the case is quietly buried by a magistrate who owes the family a favour, and the Xues remove to the capital and take rooms in the Jia compound. Officially Baochai has come to be entered for palace selection, as a companion to an imperial princess. Nothing ever comes of it. She simply stays, for the rest of the book, in a house that is not hers.

She is a year or two older than Baoyu, and she is his opposite number in every register the novel keeps. Where Lin Daiyu is thin, sharp and incapable of concealment, Baochai is ample, warm, immaculately tactful and almost impossible to read. She is the better-educated of the two in the classics; she has read the plays and novels a young lady should not have read, which is how she is able, in Chapter 42, to take Daiyu aside for quoting one of them aloud and warn her privately instead of exposing her. Her illness is congenital — a heat in the blood from the womb — and the cure prescribed for it in Chapter 7 is the Cold Fragrance Pill 冷香丸: the pollen of four flowers gathered in four seasons, ground with rain from Rain Water, dew from White Dew, frost from Frost Descent and snow from Slight Snow, buried under a flowering tree and dug up when needed. The remedy for heat is cold. The remedy for feeling is not to feel.

In Chapter 8 she asks to see Baoyu’s jade and reads the inscription on it, 「莫失莫忘，仙寿恒昌」. Her maid Yinger remarks that it makes a pair with the words on her own golden locket, 「不离不弃，芳龄永继」, and is hushed. That is the birth of the gold-and-jade match 金玉良缘, which will be set for the rest of the novel against the stone-and-flower bond 木石前盟 that binds Baoyu to Daiyu. Baochai says nothing to advance it and nothing to stop it. In Chapter 28 the Imperial Concubine sends festival gifts out from the palace, and Baoyu and Baochai receive identical sets while Daiyu receives a lesser one; again nobody comments, and everybody understands.

Chapter 27 is the one time the novel lets her run. Chasing a pair of butterflies with a round fan, she comes to the Dripping Emerald Pavilion and overhears two maids discussing a handkerchief and a lover. To escape without being caught eavesdropping she calls out as though she has been looking for someone else — 「颦儿，我看你往哪里藏！」 — and walks away, leaving Daiyu’s name in the air behind her. It is the coldest thing she does, it takes four seconds, and the book passes no judgement on it at all.

She lives at Alpinia Park 蘅芜苑, planted with creepers that look like weeds and smell extraordinary, and her sobriquet from Chapter 37 is 蘅芜君. Her room, when Jia Mu sees it in Chapter 40, is bare as a snow cave — no scroll, no vase, one plain jar of chrysanthemums — and the old woman finds it frightening in a girl of that age. In Chapter 56 she runs the garden’s finances alongside Tanchun, and does it well. In Chapter 63, drawing lots at Baoyu’s birthday, she draws the peony: 艳冠群芳, first among flowers, with the line 「任是无情也动人」 — even in her indifference she moves you.

Her verse in Chapter 5 is shared with Daiyu, and the halves are legible: 「可叹停机德」 is hers, invoking the wife who cut her own weaving from the loom to shame her husband back to his studies; 「金簪雪里埋」, the gold hairpin buried in snow, is her name and her ending together. The song 终身误 states her whole marriage in advance: 「都道是金玉良姻，俺只念木石前盟。」 and 「纵然是齐眉举案，到底意难平。」

In Chapters 96 and 97 the family swaps her for Daiyu behind the wedding veil. She knows. She goes through with it — 薛宝钗出闺成大礼 — and marries a man who believes he is marrying someone else, while that someone else dies across the garden. In Chapter 119 Baoyu passes the provincial examination, ranks seventh, and walks away into the snow. In Chapter 120 she is left pregnant in a diminished house, having been correct, dutiful and patient throughout, and having won nothing worth having.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She paints the butterflies. The single sheet takes the first half of Chapter 27’s couplet — 滴翠亭杨妃戏彩蝶 — and the butterfly is there in the top left corner, small and carefully drawn, the only precise thing in the picture. Everything else is in motion: an orange-red sash swings a complete open loop around the figure, hair streams back in long wet black strokes, the skirt flares over a grey rock. She holds the round silk fan low in her right hand, and painted on that fan is a pink peony — the flower she will draw by lot in Chapter 63, put here thirty-six chapters early. The left hand is drawn up to the breast with the fingers curled, exactly where the golden locket sits, and Xiang Li declines to paint the locket. The background is bare paper.

The choice is a contradiction and it is deliberate. Baochai is the character of the snow cave, the unornamented room, the closed face. This painting gives her the strongest colour and the widest movement of the three sheets on this page. Xiang Li paints the one moment when Baochai is not composed.

The Calligraphy

The sheet reads 宝钗 — the personal name alone, without the surname 薛 and without 蘅芜君, the sobriquet the Crab-flower Club gave her in Chapter 37. It is the intimate form, the one used inside the family, and it sets this painting in the same register as its neighbour: 黛玉 and 宝钗, two girls, not two literary titles.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her cousin and eventually her husband, married to her by deception in Chapter 97 and gone by Chapter 119.
• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — her rival and, from Chapter 45, her sworn sister; they share a page and a verse in the Main Register.
• Xue Pan 薛蟠 — her elder brother, whose manslaughter in Chapter 4 brings the family to the capital.
• Xue Yima 薛姨妈 — her mother, sister of Baoyu’s mother Wang Furen, which makes the marriage a matter of two aunts agreeing.
• Yinger 莺儿 — her maid, whose remark in Chapter 8 lets the gold-and-jade match out into the open.

Others of the same kind · Xue family Xiangling 香菱 · Xue Pan 薛蟠 · Xue Ke 薛蝌

Named on these pages Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 · Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 · Jia Tanchun 贾探春 · Shi Xiangyun 史湘云 · Xiangling 香菱 · Sheyue 麝月 · Xiaohong 小红 · Xue Baoqin 薛宝琴 · Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 · Xue Pan 薛蟠 · Zhen Baoyu 甄宝玉 · Xue Yima 薛姨妈 and 14 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