薛宝琴

Her Story

She arrives in Chapter 49, in the same crowd of cousins that brings Xing Xiuyan and the Li sisters, and is immediately the most admired person in the garden. Her brother is Xue Ke; their father traded up and down the empire and took her with him, so by fifteen she has seen more of China than anyone else in the book. She is also already spoken for: 当年父亲在京时已将胞妹薛宝琴许配都中梅翰林 之子为婚 — betrothed, before his death, to the son of a Hanlin academician named Mei.

Grandmother Jia takes to her at once, keeps her in her own rooms, and gives her the 凫靥裘, a cloak of wild-duck down. In Chapter 50 the household comes through the snow to the plum garden and finds her already standing on the slope in it, waiting, a maid behind her holding a vase of red blossom. Somebody says it is just like the 《双艳图》 by Qiu Shizhou 仇十洲 that hangs in Grandmother Jia’s room; Grandmother Jia shakes her head and says the painting has neither that coat nor that girl in it. She then asks for Baoqin’s date of birth and family circumstances, and Aunt Xue, reading the intention exactly, has to explain that the girl is promised to the Meis.

She writes. In Chapter 51 she produces ten quatrains on historical sites she has actually visited, each concealing a riddle — 赤壁怀古 first — and the household argues about the answers without solving them. In Chapter 52 she recounts meeting a fifteen-year-old girl from a country called 真真国 on the western sea coast, yellow-haired and coral-hung, who wrote Chinese verse, and recites the poem from memory.

Nothing bad happens to her. In Chapter 118 it is mentioned in passing that the Mei family took her and she is well off. In a book that destroys everyone, she was already engaged elsewhere.

In Xiang Li's Hands

Chapter 50, and Xiang Li puts the plum branch in her own hand. She stands in pure profile, chin up, a fur-lined hood over her hair, in a heavy robe worked with pale blue-green scroll roundels under a white fur cloak; a sprig of red plum rises past her head. There is no snow: the snow is the paper, left blank, with only a band of red and black slashes at her feet. The duck-down cloak the novel makes so much of is painted grey-black rather than iridescent, and the picture is almost monochrome but for those few red dots.

The Calligraphy

宝琴 alone at the upper right, two characters — the given name without the surname 薛, though the register entry carries it. She is the only figure in this group who has a surname and does not get it, and the omission reads as intimacy rather than reduction: the household called her 宝琴 and 琴姑娘 and treated her as a daughter within days of her arrival. The name sits high and small, well clear of the figure.

Connections

• Grandmother Jia 贾母 — doted on her, dressed her in the duck-down cloak, and tried to secure her for Baoyu.
• Xue Ke 薛蝌 — her elder brother, who brought her to the capital and later married Xing Xiuyan.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — her cousin, in whose family she stayed and against whose accomplishments she was constantly measured.
• Aunt Xue 薛姨妈 — Baochai’s mother, who had to explain to Grandmother Jia that the girl was already promised.
• Shi Xiangyun 史湘云 — fellow poet of the garden, and among the loudest arguing over her ten riddles.

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 · 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 Xue Ke 薛蝌 · Xiaoluo 小螺 · Douguan 豆官

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