衠陰世界 A Poem on the Women's Country
有詩為證。詩曰：有诗为证。诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
There is a poem to bear witness. The poem says:
有詩為證 — "there is a poem to bear witness" — is the storyteller's way of stopping the action to deliver a set-piece, and 詩曰 is the colon that follows it. 為證 fixes 為 as wéi.
The holy monk, come west to worship Buddha, reached Western Liang, a realm of unmixed yin, a world where yang runs thin.
The poem says out loud what the prose has carefully avoided saying. 衠 is zhūn, wholly or unadulterated — a vivid everyday intensifier that barely appears outside Yuan and Ming plays and fiction. 佛 is fó throughout. And 少 here is shǎo, scant, against the shào it took in 老少 back in the marketplace: the same character, two readings, a few lines apart.
Farmer, scholar, artisan, merchant — every one of them women; fisher, woodsman, ploughman, herdsman — all in rouge and powder.
Two complete lists of everybody, run against each other. 農士工商 is the four estates — farmer, scholar, artisan, merchant — the standard way of dividing up a society. 漁樵耕牧 is the four country callings of poetry and painting: fisherman, woodcutter, ploughman, herdsman. Each list is meant to leave nobody out, and using two of them makes doubly sure. 盡 is jìn.
Fair maids throng the road and cry out for the seed of men; young wives crowd the street to receive the powdered gallant.
人種 again takes zhǒng, as in the prose above. 粉郎, "the powdered gentleman," was a compliment paid to a good-looking man. Set opposite 人種 in the matching half of the couplet — the pair of lines that answer each other, position for position, it acquires an edge: the flattering word and the breeding-stock word are made to occupy the same slot.
Had Wuneng not put on that hideous face of his, the siege of mist and flowers would have been past all bearing!
醜相 takes 相 as xiàng, appearance. 難當 is nán plus dāng, not to be withstood. 不 shifts to bú before 是. And 煙花 — mist and flowers, the long-standing figure for the pleasure quarter — is the second half of the chapter's own title, 心猿定計脫煙花. The poem is quietly naming the trap the chapter will have to escape.
The poem — eight seven-character lines, every second one rhyming on the same sound — does the work the prose has carefully refused to do: it states the premise. 衠陰 — unmixed yin — is a claim about how the world is put together, and once it is made, the country stops being a curiosity and becomes an imbalance: a place where one of the two principles that constitute everything is simply missing. The novel is always interested in such places, and it usually treats them as ill.
The second couplet is the sharpest thing here. Two exhaustive four-part lists — the four estates, the four country callings — are set against each other and both come back the same. The figure is completeness, and its effect is to close every exit: there is no corner of the social order, high or low, town or country, where the rule fails. The second line adds one more turn by putting fishermen and woodcutters in rouge, which is at once total inversion and mildly absurd.
Then the last couplet deflates all of it into farce. After the cosmology and the taxonomies, the thing that actually saves the pilgrims is Eight Rules pulling a face. The novel does this again and again — raises the stakes to the level of first principles and then lets the plot be resolved by a low-comedy gag — and the effect is not to mock the first principles but to insist the two levels are continuous. 煙花, the last word of the poem, is lifted straight into the chapter's own title, so the poem works as a hinge: it names the danger that the second half of the chapter will have to get out of.