贾代儒

His Story

Jia Dairu belongs to the 代 generation, the oldest surviving rank of the clan, but to a poor branch of it with no office and no income. What he has is the family school, 家塾, and the post of 塾掌: the clan chose 年高有德之人, a man old and of good character, to drill its sons. Every boy in the house passes through his room.

He is not equal to it. Chapter 8 shows what admission costs from the other side — Qin Ye, an official near seventy with an empty purse, scrapes together twenty-four taels 恭恭敬敬 and brings Qin Zhong to Dairu’s house in person to be received. Chapter 9 shows the room itself. Dairu is called away on business, leaves a seven-character couplet for the boys to match and his grandson Jia Rui in charge, and by the time anyone thinks of him the school has fought itself to a standstill with inkstones and satchels.

Chapter 12 is his real scene, and he stands on the wrong side of it. He beats Jia Rui thirty or forty strokes for going out at night without leave, refuses him food, and makes him kneel in the courtyard over his books — punishing the boy for the first of Wang Xifeng’s traps, which he cannot see. When Jia Rui sickens, the old man walks to the Rong mansion to beg two taels of ginseng, and Xifeng sends him a few pinches of stalk and dust. Then Jia Rui dies, and it is Dairu who calls for a fire to burn the mirror, and Dairu who hears it cry out.

He is still at it in Chapter 82, when Baoyu is sent back to school and the old man lectures him line by line through the Four Books. The chapter title calls him 老学 究 — the old pedant.

In Xiang Li's Hands

An old man standing in profile, facing left, in the most severe palette in this group: a black robe laid in with a broad wet brush over a white under-robe, a blue-grey turban, a long white beard. His right hand is raised and open, palm up, each finger drawn separately — the gesture of a man in the middle of explaining something. It is the most finished thing on the sheet. Behind his knees there is a grey rock, and then nothing. She paints him as a teacher rather than as the grandfather who beat a boy and then buried him.

The Calligraphy

贾代儒 runs down the right-hand side in three characters — the only inscription in this group to carry a generation name, the 代 that places him a full rank above Jia Zheng and two above Baoyu. The hand is dry and upright and sits close against the black mass of the robe. It reads as the name of a position as much as of a person: 代 for the generation, 儒 for the Confucian scholar, which is all the novel ever lets him be.

Connections

• Jia Rui 贾瑞 — his grandson and ward, whom he beats, nurses and outlives.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — his pupil, in Chapter 9 and again in Chapter 82.
• Qin Zhong 秦钟 — his pupil, presented to him in person by a father who could barely afford the fee.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — refuses him the ginseng for Jia Rui, having caused the illness herself.
• Jia Zheng 贾政 — the clan elder who sends Baoyu back to his schoolroom in the closing volumes.

Others of the same kind · Jia clan – collateral branches Jia Rui 贾瑞 · Jia Qiong 贾琼 · Jia Chang 贾菖 · Jia Ling 贾菱 · Jia Ping 贾萍 · Jia Jun 贾菌 · Jia Yun 贾芸 · Jia Qin 贾芹 · Jia Xing 贾荇 · Xiluan 喜鸾 · Sijie'r 四姐儿

Named on these pages Qin Zhong 秦钟 · Jia Rui 贾瑞 · Lou Shi 娄氏 · Jia Rui Zhi Mu 贾瑞之母

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