薛蟠

His Story

Xue Pan is the only son of Aunt Xue and the elder brother of Xue Baochai, heir to a hereditary commission supplying the Imperial household. The Xues are one of the four great families named on the 护官符, the doggerel every new magistrate is handed so that he knows whom not to touch.

The novel introduces him in Chapter 4 by having him kill a man. He wants a girl the traffickers have already sold to a young gentleman named Feng Yuan; his people beat Feng Yuan, who dies three days later; Xue Pan travels on to the capital as though nothing had occurred, and Jia Yucun, newly appointed and newly instructed, disposes of the case with a fiction. The girl is Yinglian, afterwards Xiangling.

Nothing is required of him again. He reads the seal 唐寅 on a painting as 庚黄 (Chapter 26). At Feng Ziying’s drinking party in Chapter 28 he supplies the only obscene verses in the book. In Chapter 34, after Baoyu has been flogged, he throws at Baochai the accusation that the beating came of her wanting a match with him, and she cries all night.

Chapter 47 is his humiliation. He takes Liu Xianglian — a gentleman of family who acts on the amateur stage — for a boy of the theatre and propositions him. Liu leads him out beyond the north gate to a reed marsh, whips him thirty or forty strokes and drags him through the mud until he is 似个泥猪一般, like a pig made of mud. He leaves on a year’s trading journey rather than be seen.

He marries Xia Jingui in Chapter 79 and meets someone worse than himself. In the hundred-and-twenty-chapter completion he kills a second man, a tavern waiter, in a drunken quarrel; the family spends its way from a charge of murder down to a charge of accident (Chapters 85–86).

In Xiang Li's Hands

No background, no ground: only the man and his clothes. He stands three quarters on in a black coat splashed with blue-green blossom, thrown open over a robe of hot pink and scarlet flowers, purple lining at the hem, a jewelled cap. What reads as a folding fan is pushed in behind his collar. His right arm swings out as one loaded black stroke and ends in a knot of ink rather than a hand. The face inside all this is small, jowled, looking down and away. She dresses him at full volume, then paints him looking at nobody.

The Calligraphy

薛蟠 stands at the top right in two large characters, the surname brushed nearly twice the size of the given name. It is the plain full name: not 呆霸王, the Oaf King, which is what a chapter title calls him, and not 文起, the courtesy name another chapter title uses when he is sentenced. On a sheet where everything else shouts, the inscription is the only quiet thing.

Connections

• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — his younger sister, who spends the novel managing the damage he does.
• Xue Yima 薛姨妈 — his mother, who cannot refuse him anything.
• Xiangling 香菱 — the girl he has Feng Yuan killed for, and takes as his chamber-wife.
• Xia Jingui 夏金桂 — his wife from Chapter 79, who terrorises him and Xiangling both.
• Liu Xianglian 柳湘莲 — the man he propositions and is beaten by, and later swears brotherhood with on the road.

Others of the same kind · Xue family Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 · Xiangling 香菱 · Xue Ke 薛蝌

Named on these pages Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 · Xiangling 香菱 · Liu Xianglian 柳湘莲 · Jiang Yuhan 蒋玉菡 · Jia Yucun 贾雨村 · Xue Yima 薛姨妈 · Xia Jingui 夏金桂 · Xue Ke 薛蝌 · Zhen'er 臻儿 · Baochan 宝蟾 · Zhang Dehui 张德辉 · Cheng Rixing 程日兴 and 16 more

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