秦钟

His Story

Qin Zhong is the son of Qin Ye, a minor official of the Board of Works nearing seventy, born to him 至五旬之上 — past his fiftieth year. His sister Qin Keqing was no relation by blood: Qin Ye, childless, had taken a boy and a girl out of a foundling hospital, and the boy died. Readers have taken his name since the earliest commentaries as a pun on 情种, seed of passion.

Baoyu meets him in Chapter 7 at the Ning mansion and is undone on sight. The novel’s description is not of a boy: 腼腆温柔，未语面先红，怯怯羞羞，有女儿之风 — shy and gentle, blushing before he speaks, timid and bashful, with the manner of a girl. His father scrapes together twenty-four taels of tuition and takes him to Jia Dairu to be entered in the clan school.

Chapter 9 is the school. The master is called away, leaves a couplet for the boys to match and his grandson Jia Rui in charge, and the room detonates into a brawl over Qin Zhong, Baoyu and two pretty boys nicknamed Sweetie and Darling; inkstones fly.

Chapter 15: the funeral party stops overnight at 馒头庵 on the way to bury Qin Keqing, and while Xifeng is selling her influence at the front of the convent, Qin Zhong takes the young novice Zhineng at the back of it.

Chapter 16 kills him. Zhineng slips into the city to find him; Qin Ye discovers it, beats his son, and dies of his own rage within a few days. Qin Zhong, already beaten and ill, follows. Demons come to fetch him and he pleads for time; the judge of the underworld relents only when Baoyu’s name is mentioned. In the received text he wakes long enough to tell Baoyu they had been wrong to think themselves above worldly success, then 长叹一声，萧然长逝 — sighs once and is gone.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Two sheets, the same gesture twice: the boy turned to look back over his shoulder, a closed folding fan held to the collarbone, ribbons streaming to the right. The first is full length — pale celadon over a mauve robe printed with dark roundels, a rose cap with two long pink streamers — and he smiles straight out at the viewer. The second is cropped at the knee: vermilion instead of green, lavender sleeves, a dark purple cap and blue ribbons. Neither gives him a book, a schoolroom, a nun or a deathbed. She paints the face the novel gave him: 有女儿之风.

The Calligraphy

Both sheets carry surname and given name, 秦钟, and neither uses 鲸卿 — the courtesy name the novel’s own chapter title prefers at the moment it kills him. The second character is not written the same way twice: the first sheet has the simplified 钟, the second the fuller 鍾 with the metal radical. On the first the name stands upright at the top right; on the second it drops to the lower left in a looser hand, and the photograph clips it at the edge of the paper.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — his schoolfellow and the great attachment of his short life.
• Qin Keqing 秦可卿 — his sister by adoption, not by blood; his father took her from a foundling hospital.
• Qin Ye 秦业 — his father, who pays his tuition, beats him, and dies of the anger.
• Zhineng 智能 — the young novice at 馒头庵, and the immediate cause of both deaths.
• Jia Dairu 贾代儒 — the clan schoolmaster to whom his father presented him.

Others of the same kind · official / noble / royal Jia Yucun 贾雨村 · Bei Jing Wang 北静王 · Leng Zixing 冷子兴 · Zhang Rugui 张如圭 · Menzi 门子 · Xiping Junwang 西平郡王 · Nan'an Taifei 南安太妃 · Zhangshiguan 长史官 · Feng Ziying 冯紫英 · Sun Shaozu 孙绍祖 · Yun Guang 云光 · Fu Shi 傅试 · Fu Qiufang 傅秋芳 · Li Yanei 李衙内 and 9 more

Named on these pages Qin Keqing 秦可卿 · Jia Dairu 贾代儒 · Jia Jun 贾菌 · Jiao Da 焦大 · Zhineng 智能 · Qin Ye 秦业 · Jin Rong 金荣 · Yu'ai 玉爱 · Er Yatou 二丫头 · Hu Shi 胡氏

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