怎生模樣 What Manner of Woman
大聖閃在怪石之傍，定睛觀看，那女子怎生模樣：大圣闪在怪石之傍，定睛观看，那女子怎生模样：
逐句解 Line by line
The Great Sage slipped aside behind a grotesque rock and watched with a fixed eye. What manner of woman was she?
模樣 takes mú, not the mó of a model or pattern. 那 is the pointing nà here — that woman — against the questioning nǎ three passages back. The tag 怎生模樣, "what manner of woman was she," is again a descriptive flourish rather than one of the novel's fixed formulas, and it rides at the end of a prose line rather than standing on its own.
Delicate, delicate — a beauty to overthrow a kingdom; slowly, slowly — her lotus steps advance.
傾國, to topple a kingdom, comes from a song by Li Yannian about a beauty who overthrows a city at one glance and a kingdom at the next — the ancestor of every "face that launched a thousand ships" in Chinese. 步移蓮 is the golden-lotus walk of bound feet, and the same image comes back in the prose a few passages on, to much less flattering effect.
Her form is Wang Qiang's; her face that of the woman of Chu.
王嬙 is Wang Zhaojun, the palace lady married off beyond the northern frontier. The woman of Chu is the celebrated beauty of that southern court. One exile north, one south.
Like a flower that understands speech; like jade that gives off fragrance.
解語 calls up the flower that understands what is said to it — the standard figure for a beauty who is also company. 似 is held at sì throughout this project.
Her high coiled hair heaps up its blackness to a kingfisher's raven gloss; her paired eyes, steeped in green, lie level as autumn water.
The character after 堆青 is 𢷑, a rare hand-radical verb for dressing or sweeping the hair, held at xiǎn throughout this project. 碧鴉 is the blue-black shine on a crow's wing, a stock comparison for a woman's hair.
Her Xiang-silk skirt half discloses the small bow-shoes; her kingfisher sleeve opens a little on the long pale wrist.
長 is cháng again, the adjective: the wrist is long and slender, not growing.
What talk is there of evening rain and morning cloud? Here truly are vermilion lips and gleaming teeth.
朝 is zhāo, morning. 暮雨朝雲 reverses the order of a phrase that comes down from a rhapsody on the Gaotang shrine, where the goddess of Wu Mountain announces that she is cloud at dawn and rain at dusk. Long before this novel was written the phrase had settled into a polite euphemism for an affair — which makes the line's dismissal of it ("what talk is there of that?") rather less innocent than it sounds. 甚 is shén, the question word.
Smooth as the waters of the Brocade River, her moth-eyebrows are finely drawn; she surpasses Wenjun and Xue Tao.
錦江 is the Brocade River at Chengdu, and it is named for a reason: both women in the closing line come from Shu, the region it runs through. Zhuo Wenjun eloped with the poet Sima Xiangru; Xue Tao was a Tang poet of the same country. 蛾眉, moth-eyebrows, are the fine arched brows of every standard portrait.
The second set-piece of the chapter is a portrait, and it is assembled almost entirely out of allusion. Wang Qiang is Wang Zhaojun, sent beyond the frontier in a marriage of state; the woman of Chu is that kingdom's famous beauty. The flower that understands speech and the jade that gives off fragrance are both fixed phrases. The closing couplet names Zhuo Wenjun, who ran away with a musician, and Xue Tao, the Tang courtesan and poet — both of Shu, which is why the Brocade River of Chengdu supplies the comparison one line earlier.
The choice of names is not neutral. Every woman here is celebrated for beauty and also for an irregular attachment: Zhaojun married out of the empire, Wenjun eloped, Xue Tao lived by her verses outside marriage altogether. Laid over the top is the goddess of Wu Mountain, whose morning cloud and evening rain had been polite code for an assignation for more than a thousand years. The portrait praises the Jade-Faced Princess in terms that quietly place her — and the previous passage has just told us exactly how she acquired her husband.
Structurally the piece travels from far to near and then stops. It opens with her walk and general impression, moves to face and comparisons, then hair and eyes, then the hem of her skirt and her wrist — the eye working inward and downward through ornament to skin. It ends before it reaches a person. What the Great Sage sees, crouched behind his rock, is an inventory, and the conversation that follows will show how little of her it told him.