秦可卿

Her Story

Qin Keqing is the most beautiful woman in the Ningguo house and the only one of the Twelve Beauties who was found rather than born. Chapter 8 gives her origin in a few flat sentences. Her adoptive father Qin Ye, a minor official in the works ministry, was childless, so he took a boy and a girl out of the 养生堂, the foundling hospital. The boy died. The girl, called 可儿 at home, was all that was left. Years afterwards Qin Ye had a son of his own, Qin Zhong. So the woman married into the senior branch of one of the capital’s two greatest families has no known parents at all.

She is Jia Rong’s wife, which makes her Jia Zhen’s daughter-in-law. Grandmother Jia rates her the most satisfactory of all the young wives — 重孙媳中第一个得意之人.

In Chapter 5 Baoyu is put down for a nap in her room. The room is furnished with a catalogue of famous erotic objects: Wu Zetian’s mirror, the golden plate Zhao Feiyan danced on, the wooden quince An Lushan threw at Yang Guifei. There he dreams himself into the Land of Illusion, reads the registers that foretell every woman in the book, hears the twelve songs, and is given by the fairy Disenchantment to her sister 兼美, “Combined Beauty”, whose style-name is 可卿. He wakes calling that name aloud. The novel’s entire prophetic machinery is delivered inside Qin Keqing’s bedroom, and the girl in the dream wears her name.

In Chapter 7 the old servant Jiao Da, drunk and being tied up at the gate, shouts what the household is: 爬灰的爬灰，养小叔子的养小叔子 — one man crawling in the ashes with his son’s wife, one woman keeping her young brother-in-law. He names nobody. His mouth is stuffed with mud and horse dung. Everyone present understands and the book never says.

In Chapter 10 she is ill. You-shi describes symptoms that could be pregnancy and could be grief; a specialist, Zhang Youshi, diagnoses from the pulse alone, without asking a question: the liver wood too strong, the spleen worn by thinking, a woman of unusual intelligence who understands too much and therefore cannot get well. In Chapter 11 Xifeng visits her, and she says plainly she will not last past the spring.

She dies in Chapter 13, at night, with no death scene. She goes first to Wang Xifeng in a dream — 我舍不得婶婶，故来别你一别, I could not bear to leave you, aunt, so I came to say goodbye — and gives her the only sound financial advice anyone in the novel receives: buy land near the ancestral graves and settle the sacrifices and the family school on it, because land tied to graves cannot be confiscated, and the children will still have somewhere to go back to. 月满则亏，水满则溢 — the full moon wanes, the full cup spills. Her parting line is 三春去后诸芳尽，各自须寻各自门: when the three springs are over the flowers are finished, and each must find her own door. Then the gong sounds four times and the house learns she is dead.

Her maid Ruizhu dashes her head against a pillar and dies; the other maid, Baozhu, takes the status of adopted daughter so somebody can perform the mourning. Jia Zhen grieves for his son’s wife as a man grieves for his own child, and buries her at a scale that ought to have alarmed everybody: coffin planks of 樯木 stored since the death of the old Prince of Yizhong, and twelve hundred taels paid to the eunuch Dai Quan for a fifth-rank commission for Jia Rong, so the banners could carry a title. Chapters 13 and 14 give her the grandest funeral in the novel, and the reader has just been told the house is finished.

Hers is the last page of the Main Register: a tall building, and a beautiful woman hanging from a beam.

情天情海幻情身，情既相逢必主淫。 漫言不肖皆荣出，造衅开端实在宁。

Out of the sky of passion and the sea of passion a body of passion is conjured; where passion meets passion, licence must follow. Do not say the degenerates all came out of Rong — the trouble began in Ning. Her song, 《好事终》, “An End to Good Things”, closes 宿孽总因情 — the old debt was always love.

There is a documented hole in this chapter. Zhiyanzhai, the earliest commentator, records that it was originally titled 秦可卿淫丧天香楼, “Qin Keqing dies in debauchery at the Pavilion of Heavenly Fragrance”, and that, moved by her dream-warning to Xifeng, he ordered the author to cut the episodes of the dropped hairpin and the change of clothes — 因命芹溪删去. He counts the loss: 此回只十页，删除天香楼一节，少去四五页也 — this chapter runs to ten leaves; cutting the Heavenly Fragrance section lost four or five. The register shows a hanging. The received text shows an illness. The gap between them is where her death used to be.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She paints neither the beam nor the bedroom. Qin Keqing sits leaning forward and down, head bowed almost into her own shoulder, holding a white long-haired kitten against her chest. Her right hand comes out bare and fully drawn, the fingers spread wide across the animal’s flank. Her face is in near profile, the eyes closed or nearly closed under one long lash stroke, the mouth a small red mark, a gold filigree ornament and a string of pearls at the temple. The kitten is the most finished thing on the sheet — soft dry-brushed fur, dark-rimmed blue eyes — and it looks straight out at the viewer while she looks at nothing. Behind her right shoulder a gnarled black mass, a garden rock or a rootwood chair, pours down the paper in wet violent ink and takes a third of the picture. Her robes are pale blue-grey blotted with pink blossom under a jade-green outer coat. At the lower left a chrysanthemum and some upright stalks are drawn in the faintest grey outline and left uncoloured. Everything else is bare paper. The only force in the picture is the black rock, and she is turned away from it.

The Calligraphy

The inscription runs down the right side in three characters, 秦可卿, with the seal below. The novel itself usually calls her 秦氏 or 蓉大奶奶 — young Mrs Rong, the household forms, which attach her to her husband. The painting instead uses the full form the Chapter 5 register uses, keeping the surname of the man who adopted her out of the foundling hospital rather than the surname of the house she married into. It is also the name Baoyu calls out in his dream.

Connections

• Jia Rong 贾蓉 — her husband, for whom his father buys a rank so that her funeral can carry one.
• Jia Zhen 贾珍 — her father-in-law, master of Ningguo, whose grief at her death is the loudest in the book.
• Qin Zhong 秦钟 — her younger brother, Baoyu’s schoolfellow and infatuation, dead in Chapter 16.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — her closest friend in the family, to whom she gives her dream-warning about the fall.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — who dreams the whole prophecy of the novel while asleep in her bed.

Others of the same kind · Jia household – wives, concubines, in-laws Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 · Li Wan 李纨 · Wang Furen 王夫人 · You Erjie 尤二姐 · You Sanjie 尤三姐 · Xue Baoqin 薛宝琴 · Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 · Li Wen 李纹 · Li Qi 李绮 · Xing Furen 邢夫人 · You Shi 尤氏 · Xue Yima 薛姨妈 · Zhao Yiniang 赵姨娘 · Zhou Yiniang 周姨娘 and 11 more

Named on these pages Yuanyang 鸳鸯 · Jia Zhen 贾珍 · Qin Zhong 秦钟 · Jia Jing 贾敬 · Bei Jing Wang 北静王 · You Shi 尤氏 · Jia Rong zhi qi 贾蓉之妻 · Ruizhu 瑞珠 · Baozhu 宝珠 · Zhang Cai jia de 张材家的 · Huang Da Nainai 璜大奶奶 · Lai Sheng 赖升 and 11 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