Truly it was a sight:

The chapter's first set piece is announced by a tag standing on its own line. 真個是 — "truly it was" — is the storyteller's signal that description is about to take over from narration; he uses it four times here, exactly as often as he uses 正是 and 只見.

Girdling the earth, remote as the sky; / congealed mist, freighted with rain.

The opening couplet runs four characters against four and stands outside the rhyme the rest of the piece keeps. The slash marks the pause the source shows with a comma.

Along the road the soft matting lies tangled; / over the hills the green canopies are spread.

翠蓋 is the green canopy of a state carriage, lifted off the vehicle and dropped onto foliage — a chauffeur's parasol over a hillside. The metaphor is doing the work of the line, so the English keeps the canopy rather than reducing it to leaves.

Thick and matted, the leaves but newly out; / clutching and dragging, at the very height of their fragrance.

Both halves open on doubled sounds, the sort of paired syllables that give Chinese verse its rustle. Watch who is doing what: 攀攀扯扯, clutching and dragging, is the brambles' own action and not that of anyone passing through them, and the English keeps it active. The thicket grabs at you.

Look far off, and there is no knowing where it ends; / look near, and it is all one green cloud, blurred and vast.

似 is fixed at sì across the corpus. The 一 in front of it shifts to yí against a falling-tone neighbour, which the corpus-wide ruling leaves standing because it does not change the tone class.

Downy and dense, / sombre and dark.

茸 is read róng. The Kāngxī dictionary, under the grass radical at six strokes, gives 而容切, 而融切 and 如容切, all three agreeing that it sounds like 戎, and the Shuōwén gloss is 草茸茸貌 — the look of grass being 茸茸, which is this line exactly. The second band, the Jíyùn's 乳勇切, sounding like 宂, is rǒng. The automatic reading gives a first-tone value answering to neither band, here and at 鹿茸 alike, and the character stood in no roster until now.

The voice of the wind comes drifting and rustling; / the shadow of the sun strikes back glittering.

Both halves end on a doubled sound-word, and both put it after the verb rather than before it, which is what gives the couplet its swing.

And in the midst of it there are pines, there are cypresses, and bamboo besides; / plum in plenty, willow in plenty, and mulberry more than either.

The longest line of the rhapsody and deliberately lopsided: ten characters against seven. 那 is the pointing nà here, aimed into the scene, and 還 is hái, "besides", not the huán of giving something back.

Fig-vine and creeper wind about the ancient trees; / rattan and kudzu coil round the drooping willows.

The couplet sets two climbing plants against two more, and each half puts the climber first and its host last — so the word order strangles the tree the way the plant does.

Coiled in clumps like trellises, / laced together like couches.

Two similes turn the thicket into furniture, which sharpens the joke waiting in the closing couplet: here is a garden nobody can walk through.

Here and there the blossom opens, brocade truly spread abroad; / from nowhere the flowers break out, and the scent carries far.

處 is chù, a place, not the verbal chǔ. 無端 is "without cause", so "unbidden", and it answers 有處 across the pause.

Being human, who does not meet with brambles? / But where has one seen the brambles of the West grow long as these?

The whole poem has been a pleasure garden until this line, and here is the sting. Two rulings turn on it. 那 is the questioning nǎ, answering 誰 in the first half — the automatic reading gives the pointing value. And 長 is cháng on the strength of the rhyme: the nine rhyme words before it — 張 芳 茫 蒼 煌 桑 楊 床 香 — are every one of them level in tone as well as in -ang, so the rhyme slot cannot take the rising zhǎng.