The idiot tucked his muckrake into his belt, straightened his green brocade gown, and walked in through the gate looking every inch the gentleman.

斯斯文文, refined and mannerly, said with the words doubled — and the doubling turns it into a performance rather than a description. 直裰 is the long straight-cut gown a monk wears.

He saw only a great hall of three bays, its blinds hoisted high, silent and utterly empty of any human trace, without so much as a table or a chair.

簾櫳高控 — the blinds hoisted high, as a house does when it is expecting guests. 家火 is household furniture. A hall dressed for company and stripped of every single thing in it: the first false note, and Bajie walks past it.

He passed the screen door, walked further in, and came to a passage hall.

穿堂 is the hall you pass through between one courtyard and the next. Bajie keeps going inward, and the narration keeps pace with him without a word of comment.

Behind the hall stood a great upper storey, its window lattice half open, and through it he made out a canopy of yellow silk.

黃綾 is yellow damask silk, a colour with imperial associations and no business in a country mansion. The half-open window lattice repeats the half-open gate.

The idiot said: "Someone must be afraid of the cold and still be asleep."

還睡哩 takes 還 as hái, still. He has now supplied a sleeping occupant for an empty house — the last thing he will get wrong here, and the least costly.

Without troubling over what was inside and what was out, he strode straight up the stairs.

不分內外 is "making no distinction between the inner and outer quarters" — a real breach of manners in a Chinese household, where the inner rooms were not entered by visitors, and a serious one from a man who was claiming the proprieties at the gate a moment ago. 拽步 reads zhuài, to stride, not zhuāi.

He put out his hand and lifted the canopy to look, and it startled the idiot into a stumble.

諕 is xià, to frighten — invariant throughout this novel, and not háo. 躘踵 is a stagger or a lurch. 躘 is left in its traditional form even in the simplified text, because the usual conversion would produce a character so rare that most fonts cannot show it at all.

For there inside the canopy, on an ivory bed, lay a heap of bones bleached white — a skull as big as a dǒu basket, and shank bones four or five chǐ long.

白媸媸 doubles a word for a dead, chalky white. The two measures are Chinese and are worth converting as you read: 斗 is the dǒu, a grain measure of about ten litres, so 巴斗 is a basket of that size and the skull is the size of a bucket; 尺 is the chǐ, the Chinese foot of roughly a third of a metre, so four or five of them is a thigh bone about a metre and a half long. 長 here is cháng, a dimension. Whatever died on that bed was not a man.

The idiot steadied himself, and unable to hold back the tears at his cheek, nodded at the skull and sighed out: "There is no telling whether you were:

你不知是 followed by a colon is the cue for a set-piece: what follows is verse. The lament is Bajie's, and it is the only sustained serious speech he makes in the whole chapter.

Marshal of which age, of which dynasty? Great general of what realm, of what kingdom?

Both instances of 那 are questions here and read nǎ — which age, which dynasty — matching the 何邦何國, what realm and what kingdom, of the second half. 大將軍 takes 將 as jiàng, the military rank, not the jiāng that takes hold of an object. 朝 is cháo, a dynasty or court.

In his day a hero contending for the mastery; today a desolation of bared bone and sinew.

當時 sets 當 at dāng, at that time. 爭強勝 is to strive for the mastery. This is the oldest turn in Chinese poetry — where are they now, the great ones — and the novel hands it to the least reflective member of the party.

No wife or child comes to wait on him; where are the soldiers to burn him incense?

妻兒 takes 兒 as ér, the child, not the little ending. 那逢 is rhetorical, "where would one ever meet with", so 那 reads nǎ. Both halves name a duty owed to the dead that nobody is performing: family to tend him, soldiers to burn incense.

Idly to look on such a thing is truly cause for sighing — a pity, this man who raised kingdoms and built his hegemony.

謾觀 is to look on idly, or to look on in vain. 興王 is to raise up a royal house, so 興 reads xīng, not xìng. The lament ends on the vanity of the enterprise rather than on the man, which is a colder note than it first sounds.