邢岫烟

Her Story

Lady Xing’s niece, arriving in Chapter 49 with the same influx of cousins as Xue Baoqin, and the opposite case. Baoqin has seen the empire; Xiuyan has nothing at all. The novel is blunt: her parents are drunks, indifferent to their daughter; her aunt Lady Xing extends only 脸面之情, the courtesy of appearances; and Jia Yingchun, the cousin she lodges with, is too inert to notice anything. She asks nobody for anything.

Chapter 57 exposes the arithmetic. Baochai meets her on a path in cold weather and asks why she is in unlined clothes. She has two taels of allowance a month; her aunt has instructed her to send one home to her parents and make do by borrowing from Yingchun; the winter clothes have gone to a pawnshop. Baochai asks which one. 恒舒典 — which happens to be the Xue family’s own. The ticket surfaces again when Xiangyun picks it up and cannot tell what it is: a girl from a marquis’s house who has never seen one.

In the same chapter Aunt Xue, who has been watching her, decides against giving her to Xue Pan and gives her instead to her nephew Xue Ke. The betrothal is made and the whole compound knows. It is the only match in the novel arranged because someone thought a poor girl worth having.

Chapter 90 takes its title from her: 失绵衣贫女耐嗷嘈, the poor girl endures the fuss over a lost padded coat — and she spends the scene stopping Xifeng from dismissing a servant on her account. In Chapters 94 and 95, when Baoyu’s jade is lost, Xiuyan is the one sent to Miaoyu, because she knew her in the south and is the only person who can get her to do anything. The marriage to Xue Ke is reported, offhand, in Chapter 118.

In Xiang Li's Hands

The palest sheet in the group. Xiuyan stands on bare paper in a sage-green outer robe so thinly washed that the brush marks show through it, over blue-grey; the trailing panel is flecked with small pink and blue blossoms, and one red shoe- tip shows at the hem. Her hand is raised to her cheek and she is faintly smiling at nothing. Xiang Li declines to paint the poverty. There are no rags and no pawn ticket — only a figure drained of pigment, which is closer to her name: 岫烟, mist on a mountain peak.

The Calligraphy

邢岫烟 runs down the upper left in three characters, and it is the full name — surname and given name both, the only one so inscribed among the eight sheets in this group. She is a poor relation living on sufferance, and the inscription gives her the one thing the household could not take back. The hand is upright and plain, with none of the running looseness the maids’ sheets receive.

Connections

• Xue Ke 薛蝌 — the cousin she was betrothed to in Chapter 57 and eventually married.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — who found out about the pawned clothes and quietly redeemed them, and kept helping without telling anyone.
• Lady Xing 邢夫人 — her aunt, who took her allowance for her parents and offered nothing beyond appearances.
• Miaoyu 妙玉 — known to her from their years in the south; the only person Miaoyu would receive on request.
• Jia Yingchun 贾迎春 — the cousin she lodged with, whose belongings she was told to borrow instead of buying her own.

Others of the same kind · Jia household – wives, concubines, in-laws Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 · 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 · 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 Miaoyu 妙玉 · Li Wen 李纹 · Li Qi 李绮 · Xue Ke 薛蝌 · Xing Zhong 邢忠 · Hei'er 黑儿 · Xing Hua Shen 杏花神

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