色色行行 Every Kind and Every Sort
逐句解 Line by line
Three or five dishes of light food, clean and sweet; a course or two of steamed bread, ample and spotless.
閑食 is food eaten between the serious dishes — the small sweet things. 饅頭 in the Ming meant a filled steamed bun as often as a plain one, and it is still the everyday word for the plain sort. The vague numbers, three-or-five and one-or-two, are a poetic habit rather than an inventory: enough of everything.
Steamed pastry and honeyed preserves, more marvellous still; deep-fried things with sugar poured over, truly delicious.
更 is gèng, the comparative more — the base reading takes it to the night-watch, which is wrong here and is the sort of thing that slips past unnoticed. The two line-endings, 奇哉 and 美矣, are classical exclamatory flourishes, and using them of fried sugar things is gently absurd: it is the register of a philosophical treatise applied to a pudding.
Several bottles of fragrant glutinous vegetarian wine — poured out, it surpassed the jade nectar;
素酒 is the novel's way of keeping everybody honest: a vegetarian wine, permitted to monks, mentioned whenever the pilgrims are entertained. 瓊漿, jade nectar, is the drink of the immortals, so the compliment is that palace wine beats what they serve in heaven — paid to a table where three beings who have actually drunk in heaven are sitting.
Several servings of Yangxian immortal tea presented — brought to the hand, its fragrance shamed the cassia.
陽羨 is a real place: Yangxian in modern Jiangsu, one of the great tea districts of Tang and Song China and the source of a tribute tea sent to the imperial court. Naming it is like naming a vineyard. 香欺丹桂, a fragrance that bullies the cassia, sets the tea against the sweetest-smelling flower of the Chinese autumn.
Every kind and every grade all provided; every colour and every sort surpassingly fine.
The set piece closes on two lines made almost entirely of doubled characters — 般般, 品品, 色色, 行行 — four of them in fourteen characters, which is how Chinese verse says absolutely everything. And 行 is háng here, a sort or category, not the xíng of walking that the character carries at all forty-two of its other appearances in this chapter.
The second half of the set piece is all food and drink, and it moves from the plain to the extravagant: steamed bread, then pastry, then fried sugar, then wine, then tribute tea.
Two of the compliments are aimed above the ceiling. The wine beats the nectar of the immortals and the tea shames the cassia, and both are being paid at a table where the guests have been to heaven and would know.
The closing pair of lines is the most concentrated doubling in the chapter — four repeated characters in fourteen. Read aloud it is a drum roll, and it exists to say one thing: there was everything.