玉面公主積雷山摩雲洞 · 40
Leaf 40 of the pilgrimage · 玉面公主 The Jade-Faced Princess
Jade-Faced Princess 玉面公主
In Journey to the West 西遊記 (c. 1592) · a demon on the road west · nicknamed 玉面公主 “The Jade-Faced Princess”
The richest woman in the book buys a famous husband with a dowry, keeps him two years, and is the first thing he loses.
The great deeds 大事記
- ch. 60
The Land Spirit Points
土地指路The Flame Mountain's land spirit supplies what the wife does not know: the Great Power King has left Plantain Cave and lives at Jilei Mountain, where a fox king died and left a daughter with a fortune of a million taels and nobody to hold it.
- ch. 60
Her Own Dowry Buys a Husband
倒陪家私She went looking for him two years back because of his fame and endowed the marriage herself, goods and servants going the wrong way from the usual direction; the text says her husband never once turned back towards his first wife.
- ch. 61
Arming the Household Retainers
外護頭目When the bull is beaten to her gate she arms her own household — some hundred-odd keepers, captains and hangers-on, '七长八短', and sends them out to hold the door for him.
- ch. 61
Raked Dead in the Cave
一鈀築死While Wukong is still trading changes with the bull in the air, Bajie takes the cave: he rakes her dead where she sits with the bull, and when the clothes come off it is no fox but a '玉面狸精', a civet in a jade face.
結局 The ending
Her guard of asses, mules, badgers and deer is cut up and the whole range of buildings burned before the bull's duel even ends, and the novel gives her no line, no ransom and no one to appeal for her. She is counted twice afterwards, and only as property: the land spirit's reason for another army, and, in her husband's list of injuries, the concubine who was cheated.
The book itself: why the monkey was pinned, which translation — The 500 years · The translations · The 81 trials