王熙凤

Her Story

She is heard before she is seen. In Chapter 3, Lin Daiyu has just arrived at the Rongguo mansion, everyone in the room is subdued in the grandmother’s presence, and a laughing voice comes in from the back — I’m late! I missed greeting our guest from far away. Grandmother Jia explains her to the newcomer with obvious relish: this one is a holy terror, they call peppery people 辣子 down south, so just call her Feng the Peppercorn, 凤辣子. It is the only introduction in the novel delivered as a warning and a boast at once.

Wang Xifeng is Lady Wang’s niece, married to Jia Lian of the elder Rongguo branch, and she runs the house. Not the household accounts — the house: staff, stores, funerals, weddings, loans, discipline, the daily thousand decisions of a compound holding several hundred people. She does it without being able to read more than a few characters. Everything is held in her head, and it is a formidable head.

Chapter 13 shows what she is worth. Qin Keqing dies at the Ningguo house, whose own management has collapsed, and Jia Zhen begs for Xifeng to be lent to him. She takes the funeral over, diagnoses the five diseases of a badly run establishment — overlapping responsibility, unaccountable stores, servants above their station, uneven rewards, no fixed hours — issues a roster, and hands out one exemplary punishment to a woman who arrives late. The great funeral runs like a clock. It is the most admiring passage Cao Xueqin writes about anybody’s competence.

The same brain, turned outward, is lethal. In Chapter 12 the poor cousin Jia Rui makes advances to her; she does not rebuff him, she arranges assignations that leave him freezing in a passageway all night and then drenched in filth, until he sickens and dies with the Mirror for the Romantic in his hand. In Chapter 15, resting at the Iron Threshold Temple during the funeral cortège, she accepts three thousand taels to lean on an official and break off a girl’s betrothal; the girl hangs herself and her intended drowns himself, and the passage notes that Xifeng, having got away with it once, grew steadily bolder. She lends the servants’ monthly allowances out at interest and pockets the return. In Chapter 25 she and Baoyu are nearly killed by Zhao Yiniang’s hired sorcery, and a scabby monk and a lame Taoist have to be sent to save them.

Her marriage is a war of position. Chapter 44 is her birthday: she is toasted all day, walks in on Jia Lian with a servant’s wife, and the party ends in a brawl with a drawn sword; the servant’s wife hangs herself. When Jia Lian secretly takes You Erjie as a second wife, Xifeng does not rage. She calls on the woman, is sweet to her, installs her inside the garden with every appearance of sisterly kindness, sets the concubine Qiu Tong on her, has her pregnancy destroyed by a bought physician, and lets her arrive at the only conclusion left. You Erjie swallows raw gold and dies. The chapter title names the method exactly: 弄小巧用借剑杀人 — a small trick, a borrowed blade, a killing.

The servant Xing’er sums her up for the household in Chapter 65: 嘴甜心苦，两面三刀……明是一盆火，暗是一把刀 — honey in the mouth and bitterness in the heart, a face for each direction; a brazier of coals where you can see, a knife where you cannot.

She miscarries in Chapter 55 and never fully recovers; management passes for a time to Tanchun, Li Wan and Baochai, and the household begins to notice how much of its order was her personal doing. Then the fall comes. The Imperial Guard search and seal the Ningguo house in Chapter 105; her private moneylending is exposed among the papers; she is stripped of authority, blamed by everyone for everything, and abandoned by the family she held together. Chapter 110 records it plainly — 王凤姐力诎失人心, her strength exhausted, she loses the confidence of the house. In Chapter 113, ill and frightened, she sends for Granny Liu, the poor countrywoman she had once patronised and half-mocked, and entrusts her daughter Qiaojie to her. It is the one disinterested thing she ever did, and it is the only one that holds: Qiaojie survives because of it. Xifeng dies in Chapter 114.

Her page in the Chapter 5 register carries a picture of a sheet of ice with a hen phoenix standing on it:

凡鸟偏从末世来，都知爱慕此生才。 一从二令三人木，哭向金陵事更哀。

The graphs 凡 and 鸟 together make 鳳, phoenix — a phoenix born, of all times, into a dying age; everyone admired what she could do. First obedience, then command, then 人 and 木 which make 休, dismissal. Weeping, she turns back toward Jinling, and that is the saddest part. Her song is called 聪明累, Cleverness Undone: 机关算尽太聪明，反算了卿卿性命 — she schemed to the last calculation, and the calculation she lost was her own life.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She stands, but the pose is all rotation: hips turned one way, shoulders back the other, head swung round to look sideways out of the picture, chin up, one hand lifted to her mouth with a jade bangle sliding at the wrist and a fingertip just touching the lip. It is the gesture of someone deciding something about you. Scarlet outer robe, turquoise collar, a lapel band of gold and blue strung with pearls, and over her arms a heavy taupe mantle painted all over with butterflies — pink, blue, cream, a dozen of them, the only soft thing in the picture and the one creature that gets caught.

Behind her, in dilute ochre outline with no colour at all, hangs a carved dragon mask with bulging eyes and trailing whiskers, and below it a tasselled ornament around a great gold disc, ringed by faint radiating arcs. It is the architecture of authority, drawn as a ghost. The right third of the sheet is bare paper.

Xiang Li refuses the register’s iconography entirely. There is no iceberg, and behind the woman named Phoenix she has put a dragon.

The Calligraphy

王熙凤 — the full three-character name, surname first, in a vertical column at the top left. She is the only figure in this group given a surname, and the surname is 王, her own family’s, not 贾. The inscription addresses her exactly as the Jia house half-consciously did: as a Wang, brought in to run the place, never quite of it.

Connections

• 贾琏 Jia Lian — her husband, whose infidelities she answers with campaigns rather than quarrels.
• 平儿 Ping’er — her maid and Jia Lian’s concubine, the only person she both trusts and spares.
• 王夫人 Lady Wang — her aunt, who hands her the management of the Rongguo house.
• 巧姐 Qiaojie — her daughter, named by Granny Liu and later saved by her.
• 刘姥姥 Granny Liu — the poor countrywoman she patronised, who repays the charity after her death.
• 尤二姐 You Erjie — her husband’s secret second wife, whom she kills by kindness.

Others of the same kind · Jia household – wives, concubines, in-laws Li Wan 李纨 · Qin Keqing 秦可卿 · 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 Jia Tanchun 贾探春 · Jia Qiaojie 贾巧姐 · Li Wan 李纨 · Qin Keqing 秦可卿 · Jia Mu 贾母 · Wang Furen 王夫人 · Ping'er 平儿 · Siqi 司棋 · Xiaohong 小红 · You Erjie 尤二姐 · Jia Lian 贾琏 · Jia Rui 贾瑞 and 56 more

The Speaking Portrait

Xiang Li’s painting, animated and given a voice. Press play.

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