道士打扮 The Daoists' Array
你看他怎生打扮。但見他：你看他怎生打扮。但见他：
逐句解 Line by line
Look how they were got up.
怎生打扮, "how were they got up" — the storyteller's invitation to look the newcomers over.
See them:
但見他, the cue that opens the costume piece.
On their heads, star-crowns; over their bodies, brocade.
星冠 is a star-crown, the ritual cap of a Daoist priest. 冠 is guān, the noun for the cap itself, not the guàn that means to put one on.
On their heads star-crowns, glittering bright; over their bodies brocade, like drifting rosy cloud.
The fù does its trick again: the couplet just given is repeated and lengthened, each half growing a tail. 彩霞飄 — brocade shimmering like drifting sunset cloud.
On their feet, cloud-toed shoes; at their waists, sashes of glossy silk.
繫 is jì here, to tie or fasten a real sash round a real waist, rather than the xì of abstract connection. 絛, tāo, is a woven silk cord.
Faces round as the full moon, clever and comely; forms like fairy-guests of the Jasper Heaven, and fair.
瑤天 is the Jasper Heaven where the immortals live, so these two are being dressed in the vocabulary the novel keeps for transcendents — which, given what they turn out to be, is the joke. 似 is sì, the comparing "like."
Star-crowns, brocade, cloud-toed shoes, silk sashes, faces round as the full moon: the portrait uses the exact vocabulary the novel keeps for immortals and great lords, and it is deployed here with a straight face. These gorgeous "fairy-guests of the Jasper Heaven" are the foremen of a slave-gang.
Put the two set-pieces side by side and the chapter's argument is already made without a word of comment. One passage ago, men in rags straining at a cliff; now, the men who own them, dressed like gods. The novel simply lets the two pictures touch.