A splendid place indeed:

真好個處所也, "truly a fine place" — the storyteller's standard signal that he is about to stop telling the story and describe the scenery at length. What follows is a 賦, a formal descriptive rhapsody.

Clouds far and faint, / the road long and winding.

It opens where an approach always opens: on distance and haze.

Though the land lay a thousand lǐ beyond, / its scenes and things were bounteous all the same.

一般饒 is "just as abundant." Far from Tang as this place is, it lacks for nothing.

Auspicious mists and lucky vapors mantled it round; / a clear wind and bright moon beckoned and swayed.

瑞靄祥煙, auspicious haze and lucky vapour, is the standard weather of a blessed and well-governed land. In this novel, if the mist is described as lucky, the kingdom is sound.

The far peaks, jagged and towering, / spread wide like a painted scroll;

嵂嵂崒崒 is a doubled sound-word for jagged, piled-up mountains; 大開圖畫 means the view opens out like a painting unrolled.

The flowing streams, purling and rippling, / dashed into scattered gems and jade.

潺潺湲湲 does the same trick for water — a purling, rippling sound made out of repeated syllables. 瓊瑤, fine jade, is what the spray is compared to.

Fit for the plow, the linked field-paths ran across the acres; / rich enough to feed, the dense herbs and fresh young sprouts.

連阡帶陌 — field-paths running north-south and east-west — is the picture of properly divided, properly worked farmland. The couplet is an assessment as much as a description: this kingdom feeds itself.

For the angler, a few households along the bends of three ravines; / for the woodcutter, a single load from the pepper-trees of two peaks.

The obligatory pair of country figures, the angler and the woodcutter, arrive to complete the idyll. 澗曲 is the bend of a ravine, 峰椒 the pepper-trees of the peaks. 擔 is the noun dàn, a shoulder-load, and because that reading carries a falling tone the 一 in front of it shifts to yí.

Rampart upon rampart, wall upon wall, secure as a moat of molten metal;

From countryside to city walls. 金湯 is short for 金城湯池 — "a wall of metal, a moat of boiling water" — the old figure for defences nothing can get through. Modern Chinese still says 固若金湯 of anything impregnable, from a fortress to a football defence.

Home beside home, door beside door, vying only in ease and leisure.

只鬥逍遙 is "competing only in taking it easy." Given the four-character phrase just before it was about siege-proof walls, the joke is deliberate: the city is built for war and used for leisure.

The ninefold high towers, like palace-halls; / the ten-thousand-zhàng tiered terraces, like brocade banners.

Now the palace quarter. 九重, "ninefold," is conventional shorthand for the imperial precinct; 萬丈, ten thousand zhàng, is frank exaggeration for height. 似 reads sì, "like."

There too were the Supreme-Ultimate Hall, the Flowered-Canopy Hall, the Incense-Burning Hall, the Contemplation-of-Letters Hall, the Proclamation-of-Governance Hall, and the Prolonged-Brilliance Hall — hall upon hall, with jade steps and golden stairs, arrayed with the capped men of the pen and the capped men of arms;

Six halls, named in a row: 太極, 華蓋, 燒香, 觀文 (with 觀 read guān), 宣政, 延英. Every one of them is lifted from real Tang and Song palace nomenclature — this invented foreign kingdom is being furnished entirely out of the Chinese imperial catalogue. 玉陛金階 is jade steps and golden stairs; 文冠武弁, "civil caps and military caps," stands in for the officials wearing them. 擺列著 takes 著 as the ongoing zhe.

There too were the Great-Brilliance Palace, the Resplendent-Sun Palace, the Lasting-Joy Palace, the Floriate-Clear Palace, the Established-Emblem Palace, and the Never-Ending Palace — palace upon palace, whose bells and drums and pipes and flutes wiped away the boudoir's grief and the springtime's sorrow.

And six palaces to match: 大明, 昭陽, 長樂 (長 = cháng, 樂 = lè, "Lasting Joy"), 華清, 建章, 未央 — Han and Tang names, every one. 鐘鼓管籥 is bells, drums, pipes and flutes, and what all that music is said to sweep away is 閨怨春愁, "the boudoir's resentment and the spring's melancholy" — the standing subject matter of a whole genre of Chinese poetry, here cheerfully abolished by an orchestra.

There were the dew-drenched flowers of the forbidden park, smoothing their tender cheeks; / there were the wind-blown willows of the palace moat, dancing their slender waists.

禁苑 is the forbidden park, 御溝 the palace moat. In the courtly manner the flowers powder their cheeks and the willows dance their waists: the garden is described as a woman throughout.

On the thoroughfare, one might see a man capped and sashed, in full ceremonial dress, riding behind a team of five horses;

頂冠束帶, capped and belted, is an official in full dress (冠 the noun, guān). 乘 reads chéng, to ride. 乘五馬, the five-horse team, was anciently the entitlement of a prefect — an official car with the right number of horses, and everybody on the street able to count them.

In a secluded spot, one might see a man bearing bow and gripping arrow, parting the clouds and mist to transfix a pair of eagles at a single shot.

幽僻中 (中 = zhōng) is a secluded spot, and the archer in it is doing something a Chinese reader recognises instantly. 貫雙鵰, skewering two eagles, points at 一箭雙鵰 — one arrow, two hawks — which is still the ordinary Chinese for killing two birds with one stone, and which happens to have started life as a literal description: it was said of the Sui general Zhǎngsūn Shèng, who actually did it.

Lanes of flowers and willows, towers of strings and pipes — its spring winds yielded nothing to the Bridge of Luoyang.

花柳, "flowers and willows," is the pleasure quarter; 管弦, "pipes and strings," is the music coming out of it. 洛陽橋, the Bridge of Luoyang, was the byword for a spring scene at its most splendid, and 不讓 — "yields nothing to" — measures Baoxiang against it and calls the match a draw.

The scripture-seeking elder, looking back toward great Tang, felt his liver and gall rend within him;

The rhapsody has spent its whole length on splendour, and now it turns and looks at the people watching. 長老 takes 長 as zhǎng. 肝膽裂, "liver and gall split apart," is the stock physical figure for overwhelming grief — Chinese puts the emotion in the organs where English puts it in the heart. What splits him is homesickness for Tang, and the magnificence in front of him has made it worse, not better.

The disciples attending their master, setting down their loads at the little post-station, felt their very dream-souls melt away.

息肩 is to rest the shoulder of its load; 小驛 is the little post-station (the 館驛 where they will sleep). 夢魂消, "the dream-soul melts away," is what exhaustion feels like from the inside. Two lines, and the grandest description in the chapter has become a picture of three tired men a very long way from home.

One could not exhaust the sights of the Land of Precious Images. Master and disciples, the three of them, gathered up their baggage and their horse and took their rest within the post-station.

看不盡, "one could never finish looking," is the conventional seal that folds a set-piece back into the story — and it raises 盡 to jìn, which in turn shifts the 不 before it to bú. 師徒三眾 is "the three of them, master and disciples"; 館驛 is the post-station, the official hostel that housed travellers on state business. The rhapsody closes, and the narrative starts again.