秦可卿警幻之妹 · 13
Leaf 13 of the Red Chamber · 兼美 Combined Beauty
Qin Keqing 秦可卿
In Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢 (c. 1791) · in the Main register (正冊) · nicknamed 兼美 “Combined Beauty”
She shows Baoyu the register, keeps his secret, and dies: the leaf on which the poem stops hinting and says the ruin began in the Ning house, not the Rong.
情天情海幻情身， 情既相逢必主淫。 漫言不肖皆荣出， 造衅开端实在宁。
Passion's sky and passion's sea conjure a body of passion; where passions once meet, excess is sure to preside. Do not say the worthless sons all came out of Rong — the making of the breach began, in truth, in Ning.
畫 A high tower and a wide hall, and in it a beautiful woman hanging from the beam.
The great deeds 大事記
- ch. 5
Marriage in the Land of Illusion
入夢In the Land of Illusion she is married to Baoyu under her own courtesy name, and it is she who teaches him to know desire before the roll of the Twelve is opened.
- ch. 10
The Physician Feels a Wasted Pulse
論病Ailing more than a month and hidden from the men of the house, she is felt for by the physician Zhang Youshi, whose grave diagnosis of a wasted pulse frightens everyone.
- ch. 13
The Dream of the School Lands
託夢Coming to Wang Xifeng in a dream at the last moment, she warns that the family's prosperity will not hold another generation and leaves a plan of school lands and sacrificial fields.
- ch. 14
The Coffin Wood Above Her Rank
出殯Buried with a costly wood no one is certain she was entitled to and a title bought for her husband, her procession carries the whole capital's carriages out to the Ning ground.
結局 The ending
Her leaf is painted with a high hall and a beauty hanging from its beam, and the verse tells the reader not to blame the Rong house for the ruin. The 120-chapter text spares the hanging and keeps the omen: an illness nobody can name, a funeral past the house's means, ruin after it.
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