贾元春贤德妃 · 4
Leaf 4 of the Red Chamber · 凤藻宫尚书 Prefect of the Phoenix-Scroll Palace
Jia Yuanchun 贾元春
In Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢 (c. 1791) · in the Main register (正冊) · nicknamed 凤藻宫尚书 “Prefect of the Phoenix-Scroll Palace”
The consort whose one permitted visit home buys the garden the whole novel lives in, and who calls the palace a place of danger and a gilded prison.
二十年来辨是非， 榴花开处照宫闱。 三春争及初春景， 虎兕相逢大梦归。
Twenty years telling right from wrong; where the pomegranate flowers open, the light fills the inner palace. The three springs never match the splendour of the first — when tiger and rhinoceros meet, the great dream comes home.
畫 A bow, and on the bow a fragrant citron hanging.
The great deeds 大事記
- ch. 16
Promoted Within the Palace Walls
才選鳳藻宮News reaches the Rong household that Yuanchun has been taken into the palace and promoted; the old servants are sent to learn the court ritual.
- ch. 18
The Homecoming on Lantern Night
省親On the lantern night she is allowed home: she weeps in her grandmother's arms, names the new garden, bids Baoyu write of it, and warns him against idleness.
- ch. 22
The Firecracker Riddle
燈謎Sends back a riddle from the palace — a firecracker, thrown away from its parent stock, its noise done and its red skins spent; Jia Zheng hears it as an omen.
- ch. 95
Death of the Consort
元妃薨逝After a long illness the Consort dies; the Cheng-Gao text sets it in the same weeks as the loss of Baoyu's jade, and the house stops prospering with her.
結局 The ending
Her verse says the pomegranate bloom lights the palace gates, and that when tiger meets rhinoceros the great dream ends. The 120-chapter text obliges: she dies in ch. 95, and within a couple of years the imperial guards search the Ning mansion and her family's wealth is taken from them.
The book itself: what happens, how long it is, which English version to read — The story · How long it is · Which translation · The lamp-oil night · The family tree · The first expulsion