杏花神

Her Story

The Apricot Blossom Spirit does not exist. Baoyu makes her up on the spot in Chapter 58 to save a girl from a beating.

He has just come down the bank past a great apricot tree, its flowers all gone and the fruit already set, and stood under it grieving over 绿叶成荫子满枝 — green leaves in shade, the branches full of fruit — and over Xing Xiuyan being betrothed. Then he sees firelight behind the rockery. Ouguan, one of the girls from the disbanded troupe, is burning paper money for her dead stage-partner, and an old woman of the Garden has caught her at it and is dragging her off to the hall with the half-burnt scraps in her fist as evidence.

Baoyu knocks the woman’s hand open with his walking stick and tells her he dreamed the night before that the Apricot Blossom Spirit asked him for a string of white paper money — burnt not by anyone of his own apartments but by an outsider, and then he would recover faster. That is why Miss Lin was asked to send this girl. And now the old woman has broken the charm; if she reports it, he will say she offended the deity on purpose to make him die sooner.

The woman drops the paper money and starts pleading. The god has done her work and is never mentioned again.

In Xiang Li's Hands

The only one of these sheets with no ground under it. She flies, tilted forward, in streaming reds and rose, one arm flung back and up, the other trailing a thin spray of apricot blossom from her fingers, black hair loose, blossom in the hair, jade bangles at both wrists, the whole robe unspooling into pale blue weather. Everyone else in this group is standing on paper. She gives the invented god the only real sky.

The Calligraphy

杏花神, three characters down the right against the cloud — a divine office rather than a name, quoted exactly as Baoyu improvised it, and the only words that ever bring her into being.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — who invents her, in the dream he did not have.
• Ouguan 藕官 — caught burning paper money for Juguan, and covered by the lie.
• Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 — named in the lie as the one who sent the girl.
• Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 — whose betrothal put Baoyu under the apricot tree in the first place.
• 花神 Huashen — the general office of flower god, of which this is a single-flower instance.

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