The Great Sage put away his gold-banded cudgel, straightened his robes, and arranged himself into a genteel bearing; then he cut down onto the main road and went straight up to the gate to look.

綽 is read chāo here, standing in for 抄, to cut across or take a short way. 扭捏 means to put on airs, to arrange oneself — a faintly comic verb, and the comedy is deliberate: the Great Sage is assembling a respectable exterior, and it is about to do him no good at all.

Out of that gateway there came all at once an old man, and this is how he looked:

但見他 announces the portrait that follows. Here the phrase is tucked onto the end of a longer sentence rather than standing alone, so the whole line does the announcing.

He wore a long gown of kudzu cloth, of a yellow that was not yellow and a red that was not red; on his head a cool hat of bamboo strips, of a blue that was not blue and a black that was not black.

The whole portrait is built on one trick, repeated: name a colour, then deny it. Yellow that is not yellow, red that is not red, blue that is not blue, black that is not black. 皂 zào is black. 篾 miè is a thin strip split off a bamboo, the stuff cheap summer hats are woven from.

In his hand he leaned on a bamboo staff of knotted joints, bent and yet not bent, straight and yet not straight; on his feet he trod a pair of shafted shoes, loose at the heel, new and yet not new, old and yet not old.

This one line carries the two rarest characters in the chapter, standing side by side, and both of them are describing an old farmer's shoes. The first is 𢯌 zhài — it is missing from the 康熙字典 altogether, and the only place it appears anywhere in 維基文庫 is this chapter, so its reading rests on the Unihan database alone. Beside it, 靸 sǎ is a shoe with the back trodden flat, a slipper: 康熙 files it under the leather section and glosses it from the 說文 as a child's shoe. The second rare character is 䩺 wēng, the shaft of a boot — 康熙 records it as a Wu-dialect word for exactly that part, and it names the same piece of footwear that 靿 will name when the Local Spirit turns up at the end of the chapter. The phrase divides as 𢯌 with 靸, then 䩺 with 鞋, matching the description-plus-noun shape of 葛布深衣, 篾絲涼帽 and 暴節竹杖 in the lines above.

His face was like red copper, his beard like a length of white silk.

紅銅 is copper with nothing alloyed into it, valued for its redness — and the third red thing in as many passages, after all that brickwork. 練 is raw silk boiled until it turns white.

Two long brows of longevity overhung his blue-green eyes; one wide laughing mouth showed a tooth of gold.

壽眉 are the long eyebrows of great age, reckoned a sign of long life. 咍 hāi is to laugh, or to gape. 碧眼, blue-green eyes, conventionally marks somebody as foreign or uncanny — and here, as an old man who is rather more than he looks.