Zhaorong

Her Story

昭容 is a post, not a person. No individual is named.

The office appears in Chapter 18, during Yuanchun’s Visitation. Its whole function is to carry the Imperial Consort’s word down from the terrace: when Jia She and Jia Zheng form up below to make their bows, 昭容 conveys the order that the ceremony be dispensed with; when Grandmother Jia and the women of the house come up, she conveys it again, and then withdraws.

That is the entire part. A voice that exists so that Yuanchun does not have to speak to her own father and grandmother directly — which is precisely the point of the scene, and the cruelty in it.

昭容 was a real Tang rank, one of the nine 嫔. Cao Xueqin uses palace titles impressionistically rather than pinning the novel to a dynasty; the same chapter also produces 彩嫔.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Two sheets, and the figure is the same in both: a palace woman bent forward from the waist, head lowered, holding an ink-black cloud-headed ruyi sceptre level in both hands. Everything else changes. The first is on bare paper, in dark red and cream and jade, a pink sash sweeping away to the left and strings of green pendants at the hip. The second floods the whole ground with mulberry wash, puts her in grey-white and dark green with a heavier jewelled headdress, and lets the trailing silk go pale against the dark.

Painting the same bow twice, changing only the colour, is what you do with an office rather than a woman. Neither sheet gives her a face turned up.

The Calligraphy

昭容, two characters at the upper left of both sheets. A rank, brushed where a name would go — nothing personal is offered because the novel has nothing personal to offer.

Connections

• Jia Yuanchun 贾元春 — the Imperial Consort she attends, and whose word she transmits.
• Caipin 彩嫔 — the other palace office from the same Visitation chapter.
• Jia Zheng 贾政 — told, through her, not to make his bows.
• Grandmother Jia 贾母 — receives the same order at the top of the terrace.

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