朱宮貝闕 Vermilion Halls and Cowrie Towers
但見：但见：
逐句解 Line by line
He saw only this:
Two characters, standing alone: the second time in the chapter that a scene-setting tag gets a line to itself. 但見 occurs exactly once in the whole chapter, and this is it.
Vermilion halls and cowrie towers, in nothing different from the world above.
朱宮貝闕 is the standard formula for a dragon palace — vermilion halls and cowrie towers. 與世不殊 states the claim the whole poem is about to illustrate: that the underwater court is furnished exactly like a court on land.
Gold serves for the roof-tiles; white jade makes the door-pivots.
為 is wéi, the "serves as" reading, and it is paired with 作 in the second half — two different verbs for one relation, which is what stops the couplet repeating itself.
Screens are spread with plates of tortoiseshell; railings are laid with beads of coral.
玳瑁, tortoiseshell, and 珊瑚, coral, are both marine, and the couplet is the first sign that this is not merely a palace but specifically a palace of the sea.
Auspicious cloud and lucky haze light the lotus throne; above they reach the three luminaries, below they enter the thoroughfares.
三光, the three lights, are sun, moon and stars. The line stretches the palace vertically between heaven and the public streets, which is a curious claim for a hall at the bottom of a pond.
It is not the Palace of Heaven, nor yet the Treasury of the Sea; truly this place outdoes Penglai.
藏 is zàng, a treasury. 賽 is sài, to outdo in contest — the same character used of the Bull King's staff outdoing a flood-dragon earlier in the chapter. 蓬壺 is Penglai under another name.
In the high hall a feast is laid, host and guests in their ranks; officers great and small in caps and beads.
羅 is to range in order. The couplet turns from architecture to the company, and the vocabulary is entirely that of a dry-land civil service.
In haste the jade maidens are called to bear the ivory trays; the immortal beauties are urged to tune the pitch-pipes.
調 is tiáo here, to tune — the bringing-into-harmony sense, not the diào of a melody or a transfer of post. This is the only 調 in the body of the chapter. 律呂 are the twelve pitch-pipes, six 律 and six 呂, which is how Chinese music theory names its scale.
The long whale sings, the giant crab dances, the turtle blows the reed-organ, the alligator beats the drum; the pearl from beneath the black dragon's chin lights goblet and platter.
長 is cháng, long. The metre breaks into three-character phrases for four beats before returning to seven, and the effect is of instruments coming in one after another. 驪頷之珠 is the pearl beneath the black dragon's chin, proverbially obtainable only at the risk of your life.
Bird-seal script is ranged upon kingfisher screens; curtains of shrimp-whisker hang along the corridors.
鳥篆 is the ancient bird-seal script, whose strokes were drawn out into bird shapes. 蝦 is xiā. Both halves furnish the hall with things only the sea could supply, worked into the shapes of the land.
The eight timbres sound in turn, mingled with the immortal Shao; gong and shang ring out and halt the clouds of heaven.
八音 are the eight classes of instrument, sorted by what they are made of — metal, stone, silk, bamboo, gourd, clay, hide, wood. 韶 is the music of the sage-king Shun. 宮 and 商 are the first two notes of the five-note scale, standing here for the whole of it.
Green-headed perch-girls stroke the jasper zither; red-eyed horse-lads finger the jade flute.
The musicians are fish given human offices, and the colour words that would ordinarily describe a singing-girl's dress here describe a species.
Dame Mandarin-fish bears up the fragrant deer jerky; the dragon maidens have golden phoenix pins in their hair.
Two rare readings in one line. 脯 is fǔ, dried meat, not the pú of the chest. 翹 is qiáo: 康熙 gives 渠遙切 for the long tail-plumes a phoenix hairpin is named after, and keeps 巨要切 for the verb of a tail lifting.
What they eat is the eight-treasure delicacies of the heavenly kitchen;
The metre breaks a second time, into a three-character tag and a seven-character phrase, and the source cuts the two lines apart at a semicolon.
what they drink is the jasper liquor of the Purple Palace, well brewed and mellow.
紫府 is the Purple Palace of the immortals. 醞醪 pairs the brewing with the strength of what comes out of it, closing the poem on the banquet itself.
The poem's argument is stated in its second line and never departed from: 與世不殊, in nothing different from the world above. Everything that follows is a piece of ordinary palace furniture rendered in marine materials. Gold roof-tiles and jade door-pivots are standard palace stuff; screens of tortoiseshell and curtains of shrimp-whisker are the same items translated into what the sea can supply.
The translation extends to the staff. The company is a court — host and guests ranged in order, officers great and small in caps and beads — and the orchestra is a court orchestra, eight classes of instrument, the music of Shun, the pipes tuned before the feast begins. But the whale sings, the crab dances, the soft-shell turtle plays the reed-organ and the alligator beats the drum. The perch are singing-girls and the mandarin-fish is a matron. Every office is filled by the animal that would naturally hold it.
There is a quiet joke in where the Great Sage is standing while all this is read out. Two passages ago he guessed the pool might hold a flood-dragon, a dragon, a fish, a tortoise, a soft-shell turtle, a river turtle or an alligator; two of those, the soft-shell and the alligator, now turn up in the band, and the dragons and the fish are at the table. And he is attending the performance in the shape of a crab, which is the one item on the guest list that is also on the menu.