入口見閻君 One Taste And You Meet Yama
逐句解 Line by line
A thousand catties boiled down to a single ladle; one ladle refined to three fēn.
杓 is sháo, a ladle — and it is one of the characters the automatic reader gets wrong on its own, offering biāo, the handle of the Dipper constellation. 分 is a unit of weight here, not a fraction: a tenth of a 錢 and ten times a 釐. Watch the numbers shrink across the line — a thousand catties, one ladle, three fēn. That is the whole rhetoric of alchemy in ten characters.
Three fēn must then be fried, calcined again and smoked again.
煅 is to calcine — to roast a mineral at high heat until it changes character — and it is a genuine alchemical operation, not a poetic flourish. 重 is chóng, again, repeatedly; not zhòng, heavy. The line has 再 twice and 重 once inside five characters, which is the sound of a process that will not end.
So is this poison made, precious as treasure and gem.
And there it is, named at last: 毒藥, poison. Five couplets of craftsmanship and then the word. 貴似寶和珍 — as precious as treasure and gem — is a boast about cost, and cost is the only measure of worth this recipe has offered.
And should you taste the savour of it, it enters the mouth and you meet King Yama.
閻君 is King Yama, the judge of the dead — a Buddhist import from India who settled thoroughly into Chinese folk belief and runs the courts of the underworld. "To meet 閻君" is a stock phrase for dying, roughly "to meet your maker", and it is still recognisable. The whole poem has been building to a punchline and this is it.
A recipe poem that ends in a death threat. Six couplets, all the vocabulary of serious craft — boiling, decoction, fire-timing, calcining, smoking — and the product is a poison so concentrated that half a tonne of raw material yields three fēn, a weight you would need scales to see.
The joke is structural. Everything about this set-piece imitates the recipes for elixirs of immortality that Chinese alchemy actually produced, and those recipes killed people too — several Tang emperors died of the mercury and lead in their longevity pills. A poem describing how to make a life-extending drug and a poem describing how to make this one would be almost impossible to tell apart until the last line.
And note where the poem sits. The pilgrims are in a courtyard admiring the scenery. The reader has just been handed a full technical specification of the thing that is going to be put in their tea, complete with the manufacturer's boast about its price. Nobody in the story has heard a word of it.