無般不備 Nothing of Any Kind Lacking
逐句解 Line by line
Walnuts and pressed persimmon cakes; longans and lychees.
⚠ The fruit begins, and the first line already carries the point. Walnuts and dried persimmon keep; longans and lychees do not. Lychees are the most famous perishable in Chinese history. A Tang emperor two generations after this one ran a relay of horses from the far south to bring them fresh to a favourite concubine, and it became a byword for imperial excess. Here they are on the table without comment.
Cocoon-chestnuts from Xuanzhou and dates from Shandong; ginkgo nuts from south of the river and hare's-head pears.
⚠ The line stretches to seven characters again, and it does it by naming provinces. Xuanzhou is in modern Anhui; Shandong is the northeast; 江南 is the country south of the Yangtze. This is a delivery map. The banquet is showing off logistics as much as taste — everything on the table has come from somewhere, and the somewheres are named. 繭栗, cocoon-chestnuts, are small round ones the size of a silkworm's cocoon.
Hazels, pine nuts, lotus seeds and grapes, all large; torreya nuts, melon kernels and water-caltrop, all matched.
⚠ 大 and 齊 end the two halves — big and even. Those are the two things a Chinese buyer looks for in dried fruit and nuts, then and now: size, and uniformity of grade. The poem has stopped describing flavour and started describing quality control.
Olives and crab apples; pingpo and sand-fruit.
Four fruits, and the last two are hard to pin down: 蘋婆 and 沙果 are both old names for small apples of one kind or another, and the novel is naming varieties the way a market stall would.
Arrowhead and tender lotus root; crisp plums and bayberries.
楊梅, the Chinese bayberry, is a dark red fruit that will not travel and is famous for it. 嫩藕 — young lotus root, which has to be dug out of mud. Every item in this line is something you can only have if somebody nearby grew it and got it here fast.
Nothing of any kind lacking; not a single article wanting.
⚠ The list closes by refusing to end. 無般不備，無件不齊 — two double negatives, perfectly balanced, meaning they had absolutely everything. It is the standard rhetorical move for a catalogue that has gone on long enough, and it always means the same thing: I could go on.
There were steamed pastries too, and honeyed sweets, and fine dishes besides; and there was good wine, fragrant tea, and rarities.
⚠ And it does go on. Having said nothing was lacking, the poem adds two more lines — pastry, sweets, wine and tea. ⚠ 美酒, good wine, at a banquet for four Buddhist monks. The precept against alcohol is one of the five, and the novel puts the wine on the table and says nothing at all. It will be four chapters before anybody in this book mentions it, and nobody ever does.
There was no telling the hundred flavours of that rare fare, all of the first quality; truly the great country of China is not as the western foreigners are.
⚠ 說不盡 — past all telling. The same construction the gods used last chapter about the Tang monk's suffering, right before they produced a list of eighty items. ⚠ And the last line is the point of the whole set piece: 中華大國異西夷, the great country of China differs from the western barbarians. It has spent nineteen lines on turnips and dried pears to say that home is better than everywhere the pilgrims have been. It is not a religious sentiment. After a hundred chapters of India as the source of all truth, the novel gives its banquet poem to Chang'an.
Eight lines of fruit, and the poem stops describing flavour halfway through and starts describing supply. Chestnuts from Anhui, dates from Shandong, ginkgo from south of the river — the banquet is showing off its delivery network. Then the nuts are praised for being large and evenly matched, which is what a buyer checks, not an eater.
⚠ The list closes on two double negatives — nothing of any kind lacking, not a single article wanting — and then keeps going for two more lines anyway, which is exactly what that formula always means.
⚠ And there is wine on the table. Good wine, named, at a banquet for four Buddhist monks who are bound by a precept against it. The novel sets it down and says nothing, and nobody in the book ever mentions it.
⚠ The last line gives the game away. All this — the turnips, the mallow, the pears from four provinces — exists to say that the great country of China is not like the western foreigners. After a hundred chapters in which India is the source of every truth worth having, the banquet poem is a piece of homesickness.