(The funeral procession of Qin-shi, spectacularly dramatized in the 2010 TV show - episode 7)
Near the start of the novel the Dream of the Red Chamber (DRC), the main character, Baoyu is introduced to a woman named Qin-shi (AKA: Qin Ke Qing). She is the wife of a young man named Jia Rong who lives across the street in a huge house just like the vast complex the main character, Jia Baoyu lives in. Jia Rong has the same family name as Baoyu because the two families have a common ancestor, six generations back.
The two huge manors are named Ning-Guo-Fu (roughly: Great House of Peace) and Yong-Guo-Fu (roughly: Great House of Diligent Effort). Baoyu and nearly all the important characters of the DRC live in the Yong-Guo-Fu, while their relatives across the street play little role in the novel except at the beginning, which I will describe.
Baoyu is invited with the rest of his family to view the plum blossoms in the garden of the Ning-Guo-Fu. After some time eating and drinking, Baoyu requests a spot to sleep for a hour or two. The young woman, Qin-shi, offers to escort him to a room and Baoyu’s grandmother allows this. The room Qin-shi takes him to has a painting of Liu Xiang gaining divine enlightenment. Next to the painting of Liu Xiang are two scrolls which say: Knowing the real world is true knowledge - Conforming to the traditional customs of the people is true accomplishment.
The author writes: Baoyu took such a dislike to the painting and the scrolls that he told Qin-shi - ‘I can’t sleep in this room!’
What is going on here?
Liu Xiang is a minor figure in Chinese history, though he was a fairly important scholar of the Han Dynasty (he died in 6 BCE, shortly before Wang Mang seized power). For most of his life Liu Xiang was the head of the Palace library and he started the project of cataloging the vast collection of scrolls (meaning he read everything). He also edited a number of books, including the Classic of Mountains and Seas (which is an interesting collection of stories about fantastic animals and gods; recently translated into English in 2001).
The two scrolls which Baoyu also disliked assert that the the physical world matters most and that living under Confucian norms is the highest good.
The author is saying: the main character (meaning the author as a young man) could not stand the idea of reading all the time and living in accord with proper Confucian / Chinese values. This seems like a remarkable statement to make about your main character.
The beautiful Qin-shi’s response to this strange objection is to take Baoyu to her room. In the stories of Feng Menglong and Ling Mengchu, if a young woman takes a young man to her room, she wants to make love to him. Baoyu’s milk-mother objects saying (correctly) that for Baoyu to sleep in a young woman’s room is improper but Qin-shi dismisses her concerns. Baoyu follows Qin-shi’s to her bedroom and finds the following objects:
A mirror which once belonged to the only female Huangdi in Chinese history, Wu Zetian (more than 1,000 years old when DRC was written).
A silver plate which Yang Yuhuan once danced upon (AKA: Yang Guifei, one of the most famous beauties in Chinese history, almost 1,000 years old).
Qin-shi’s bed which once belonged to a princess famous for her seductive powers and a curtains of pearls which were made for another beautiful princess.
This is an astonishing collection of objects for a young woman whose only claim to status is being the primary wife of the grandson of the master of the Ning-Guo-Fu. The Empress of China (the Huangho) would be unlikely to have such possessions. How could Qin-shi possibly own such rare antiques? Someone must have given them to her. But her husband is not more than 20 years old and has no income, so he couldn’t have bought these. The only plausible source of these valuable items is her husband’s father.
Baoyu tells Qin-shi he will be happy to sleep in her room - which is not a surprise!
The story continues with Baoyu falling asleep but having a long, detailed dream. In this dream, Baoyu follows Qin-shi to a delightful garden and then then she turns into the Goddess of Love. Later she introduces him to her sister, the Goddess of Desire. After reading some short poems which foreshadow the future, Baoyu makes love to the Goddess of Desire. When he wakes, he tells his maid Aroma, about his wonderful dream and that night he makes love to her, for the first time.
It is safe to assume that the author didn’t make love to the Goddess of Desire and didn’t have a very long dream in the bedroom of Qin-shi. Instead, I think it is a safe bet that the author is describing his first sexual encounter with a woman.
The Death of Qin-shi
Baoyu meets Qin-shi one more time in the next chapter. She is not feeling well and she tells Baoyu that she doubts she will live to see the next year. At this he feels heartbroken and cries bitter tears. As she predicted, Qin-shi dies just before the new year and her husband’s father, Jia Gen, stages the most elaborate funeral imaginable. The effort and money spent for Qin-shi’s funeral are simply unbelievable given her relatively minor status and the fact that she hasn’t given birth to any children.
How does this make sense?
It turns out that in the earliest known version of the novel, Qin-shi is described as having an affair with her husband’s father, Jia Gen. In Chinese this is called crawling in ashes and it is a grave moral failure. However, an annotation to this early text made by the commentator Old Broken Tablet demanded that the author remove the paragraph which described this scandalous relationship. The book which was was printed in 1791 contains only a single oblique reference to this plot element but no explanation is given for staging of such an elaborate funeral for a young woman who just happened to have museum quality items in her bedroom.
Three further elements to this story:
There is a suggestion that Baoyu’s grandfather Cao Yin, did have an affair in his old age with one of his son’s wives.
One of the poems Baoyu reads in the palace of the Goddess of Love suggests that Qin-shi committed suicide, so she didn’t die from an illness.
Qin-shi’s primary maid also killed herself soon after Qin-shi’s death. Given Qin-shi’s modest background and her youth, such an act is highly suspicious, as her primary maid couldn’t have known Qin-shi for more than a few years. The presumption is that the maid discovered her mistress in bed with her father-in-law and she then killed herself not out of any sense of obligation but because she feared Jia Gen’s retribution against her.