忠义亲王老千岁
《红楼梦》 / 常规人物名册之外的一位人物
忠义亲王老千岁
“The Coffin He Never Came For”
His Story
He never appears. In Chapter 13, hunting boards for Qin Keqing’s coffin, Xue Pan offers Jia Zhen a plank of 樯木 out of the family timber shop — brought back years ago by his late father, and originally ordered by 义忠亲王老千岁. “因他坏 了事，就不曾拿去”: he came to grief, so it was never collected. It has stayed sealed in the shop since, nobody daring to price it. Jia Zheng warns that no ordinary man should be buried in such a thing. Jia Zhen uses it anyway.
That is the whole of him — a prince ruined offstage, whose unclaimed coffin is the first object in the novel to carry the smell of a great house falling.
In Xiang Li's Hands
An old man in a near-white dragon robe, hair and beard streaming sideways, head bowed, hands lost in his sleeves, turning away up the sheet. The only colour is the blue-and-gold dragon at cuff and hem. Behind him the paper is torn up by slashing grey strokes — sleet, or bare branches. She paints him alive and walking, in the robe he lost.
The Calligraphy
忠义亲王老千岁 — seven characters down the left margin and not one of them a name: princely rank, then honorific, then the courtesy age-title, stacked where a person would be.
Connections
- Xue Pan 薛蟠 — offers Jia Zhen the boards the prince ordered and never took.
- Jia Zhen 贾珍 — takes them, against advice.
- Qin Keqing 秦可卿 — buried in the coffin meant for him.
- Jia Zheng 贾政 — warns that the wood is not for ordinary men.
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
