王子腾之女

Her Story

Wang Ziteng is the most powerful man the family has: brother to Baoyu’s mother and to Aunt Xue, uncle to Wang Xifeng, Commander of the Metropolitan Garrison and later promoted to Inspector-General of Nine Provinces. His daughter gets one sentence.

It falls in Chapter 70, the chapter of the revived poetry club and the willow- catkin verses. Word has just come that Jia Zheng will be home by midsummer, and then: Wang Ziteng’s daughter has been promised to the son of the Marquis of Baoning, the day is fixed for the tenth of the fifth month, and Xifeng is out of the house three days in five getting it done. Afterwards Wang Ziteng’s wife comes over to collect Xifeng and asks the young people too; Grandmother Jia and Lady Wang send Baoyu, Tanchun, Daiyu and Baochai, who go off in fresh clothes and come back at lamp-lighting.

She never appears, never speaks, is never named. Her marriage exists in the novel as a demand on someone else’s diary. Her father dies on the road back to the capital in Chapter 96, and the protection the Jia house had been resting on dies with him.

In Xiang Li's Hands

The most airborne sheet in this group, for the character with the least in the book. She turns on one hip with both arms out — one hand open and raised, one lowered holding a sleeve — in a green feathered cape over pale robes, a lotus in her hair, a collar of red beads. The sleeves and streamers loop right across the paper in long unbroken lines, and the background is a grey wash swirled into circles, like wind. Nothing marks her as a bride. Xiang Li gives a woman the novel keeps entirely offstage the treatment usually reserved for an immortal.

The Calligraphy

王子腾之女, five characters down the right — her father’s name and the word “daughter”, which is the whole of what the novel supplies.

Connections

• 王子腾 Wang Ziteng — her father, the family’s highest-placed man at court.
• 保宁侯之子 — the husband she is sent to on the tenth of the fifth month.
• 王熙凤 Wang Xifeng — her cousin, who runs the wedding and is away from the Garden for weeks doing it.
• 王夫人 Wang Furen · 薛姨妈 Xue Yima — her aunts, and the reason the Jia and Xue households are involved at all.

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