Zhang Youshi

His Story

Feng Ziying’s old teacher, in the capital on his son’s business — learned, deep in medical theory, and said to be able to tell from a pulse whether a patient will live. Ningguo House calls him in Chapter 10 for Qin Keqing. He takes her pulse, then recites her symptoms before anyone describes them, and traces the illness to a mind too quick and too willing to worry. He writes a prescription and tells Jia Rong that if she reaches the spring there is hope. She does not.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Not a sickroom. She puts him outdoors among grey bamboo strokes, hunched over a sprig of red-flowered herb held close to his face, a long staff in the other hand, blue-edged rocks at his feet. The doctor painted as a gatherer of simples, reading a plant instead of a pulse.

The Calligraphy

The inscription gives the full name 张友士 with no title — not 太医, not 先生 — which suits a man in the house as a friend’s teacher rather than as a hired physician.

Connections

• Qin Keqing 秦可卿 — the patient whose pulse he reads and whose case he will not call curable.
• Jia Rong 贾蓉 — her husband, who receives the prescription and the warning about spring.
• Feng Ziying 冯紫英 — recommends him to the Jias as his own childhood teacher.

Others of the same kind · doctor Wang Jiren 王济仁 · Hu Junrong 胡君荣 · Bao Taiyi 鲍太医

Named on these pages Bao Taiyi 鲍太医

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