The fine night of the fifteenth; the Upper Prime, and spring's colours mild.

三五 is three times five — a poetic way of writing the fifteenth that the tradition has used for two thousand years. The rhapsody opens by dating itself, exactly as the garden rhapsody did.

Flower-lamps hang above the bustling market; with one voice they sing the song of peace.

太平歌, the song of great peace, is what a well-governed town sings at a festival. The line is a compliment to the prefect, and the novel means it — this is a happy place.

And then one sees the six streets and three markets alight, and in mid-air a single mirror newly risen.

The 一鑑, a single mirror, is the full moon — and it is "newly risen," so the rhapsody has caught the exact moment the moon clears the roofs on the one night of the year it is guaranteed to be full. 六街三市 means the whole town.

That moon is as though the river-god had shoved up a molten silver plate; these lamps are as though fairy maidens had woven a brocade to spread over the ground.

The couplet that sets moon against lamps and will keep doing so. 馮夷 is Feng Yi, the god of the Yellow River, imagined here heaving the moon up out of the water like a dish. A reading: 鋪 is pū, the verb — to spread something out flat — not pù, a shop, which is the same graph's other life.

The lamps catch the moon, and double its brightness;

The first half of a two-line proposition, and the arithmetic is the joke: 增一倍, increased by one fold.

the moon shines on the lamps, and adds a tenfold splendour.

And the second half raises the bid: 添十分, ten parts added. Moon and lamp lighting each other is the standard conceit of Lantern Festival poetry, and this couplet does it with a straight face and an escalating figure.

There is no seeing to the end of the iron-chain star-bridge, no finishing the lamp-flowers and fire-trees.

A reading that repeats from the previous batch and for the same reason: the 不 in 觀不盡 is bú, because the graph after it is baked jìn, a falling tone. 鐵鎖星橋 is a chain bridge strung with lamps until it reads as the Milky Way.

Snowflake lamps and plum-blossom lamps, like spring ice cut into pieces;

Here the rhapsody settles into its real business: a catalogue of lantern shapes, two to a line, for eleven lines. It is a shopping list turned into poetry, and the pleasure of it is the sheer inventory.

embroidered-screen lamps and painted-screen lamps, five colours clustered together.

攢 is cuán, to cluster or gather in — not the zǎn that means to hoard, which the same graph also spells.

Walnut lamps and lotus lamps, hung high on the lamp-towers;

The catalogue moves from the abstract to the edible. A walnut lamp is exactly what it sounds like: a lantern made in the shape of a walnut.

green lion lamps and white elephant lamps, propped high on the lamp-frames.

The green lion and the white elephant are the mounts of the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī and Samantabhadra — a piece of Buddhist iconography turned into street decoration. This novel has met both animals in person, and neither encounter went well.

Shrimp lamps and turtle lamps, waved about before the sheds;

The shrimps and turtles are handheld — 高弄 is somebody brandishing one. The catalogue has moved down from the towers to the crowd's hands.

sheep lamps and rabbit lamps, full of life under the eaves.

精神 here is not "spirit" in the abstract sense but liveliness — the lamps look alert. Rabbit lamps are a Lantern Festival staple, because the moon has a rabbit on it.

Hawk lamps and phoenix lamps, joined and set side by side;

相連相併 takes 相 as xiāng, mutually — linked to one another. It is not the xiàng of a face or an appearance, which is the same graph.

tiger lamps and horse lamps, walking together and going together.

A reading the automatic machinery gets wrong. 同走同行 takes 行 as xíng, to go — the natural partner of 走, to walk — and not háng, a row. The lamps are described as though they were moving in company, which on a lantern frame they are.

Crane lamps and white-deer lamps, with the Star of Longevity riding them;

The 壽星 is the god of long life — the high-domed, white-bearded old man who still turns up on Chinese birthday cakes. Crane and deer are his usual mounts, so the lantern is a complete little tableau.

goldfish lamps and great-whale lamps, with Li Bai mounted high.

The poet Li Bai, riding a whale. Legend has it he drowned trying to embrace the moon's reflection in a river, and popular tradition turned that into an ascent: carried off to heaven on the back of a whale. A reading: 長 is cháng here, long, describing the whale — not zhǎng, to grow, which is what the automatic reading takes at almost every site in this chapter.

The Ao-mountain lamp, where the immortals gather in assembly;

The 鰲山 again, the great artificial mountain of lamps named for the turtle that carries the isles of the immortals. Here it is peopled with immortal figures.

the running-horse lamp, where generals cross weapons.

The 走馬燈 is a real and lovely device: a lantern whose rising heat spins an inner cylinder, so painted figures chase each other endlessly round the paper shade. A zoetrope, three centuries before the word. Chinese still uses the phrase for anything that whirls past in a blur. And 將 here is jiàng, a general — not the jiāng that does grammatical work elsewhere in this chapter.

Ten thousand households of lamplit towers and terraces; ten and more lǐ of a world of cloud and mist.

The catalogue stops and the camera pulls back. 雲煙世界 — a world of cloud and mist — is smoke and lamplight over a whole town seen at once, and it is the image the passage is named for.

Over on that side, jade saddle-flaps come flying with a jingling and a clinking;

Two lines of pure sound. 索琅琅 is the ring of metal harness. A 韂 is the flap that hangs beside a saddle to keep mud off the rider.

over on this side, perfumed carriages go rumbling and rolling past.

轂轆轆 is the noise of wheels, written down. The pair 那壁廂 and 這壁廂 — over there, over here — is a storyteller's way of swinging the head from one side of a street to the other.

Look at the painted upper storeys: leaning on the rails, screened by the blinds, shoulder against shoulder, hand in hand, the beautiful women, two by two, are greedy for pleasure;

Four 著 in one line, all of them zhe, the marker that holds an action open — leaning, screened, touching, holding, all of it going on at once rather than one after another. This is the line that tells you what a Lantern Festival was socially: one of the very few nights when respectable women were out after dark in numbers, up on the balconies where they could see and be seen.

and by the green-water bridge, amid the noise and the crush and the tipsiness and the laughter, the sightseers go by in pairs, playing at the coloured lamps.

Four doubled sound-words in a row — noisy, thronged, drunk, laughing — which Chinese piles up where English would reach for adjectives. The effect is closer to hearing a crowd than to reading about one.

Throughout the city the pipes and drums make an uproar; all night long the singing and the playing never stop.

The rhapsody closes on noise that does not end. 徹夜 — right through the night. Which means the streets will still be full at the hour when the pilgrims are standing on a bridge looking at three lamps.