Master and disciples enjoyed themselves for a whole day; they looked at the lamps in the hall, and then all went out to see the lamps and the entertainments.

A day gone, in nineteen characters. 玩賞一日 — a whole day spent on pleasure — and then out again after dark. Notice the shape the chapter is drilling: eat, stroll, look at lamps, sleep, repeat. By the time the real night arrives, going out will not feel like a decision at all.

And this is what they saw:

The third rhapsody cue of the batch. This one introduces the lanterns, which is the image the chapter is named for.

Agate flower-cities, glazed immortal grottoes, palaces of crystal and mica: like brocade heaped on brocade, like filigree layered on filigree.

The lantern rhapsody opens on architecture made of light. These are not buildings — they are the enormous set-piece lanterns of a Chinese Lantern Festival, built as palaces and mountains and lit from within, which is why they can be made of 琉璃 and 水晶雲母, glazed glass and crystal and mica. The doubled 重重 and 疊疊 pile the layers up.

The star-bridge's reflection shakes till heaven and earth seem to move; watch the several fire-trees swaying red.

Two festival fixtures, both real. A 星橋 is a bridge hung with lamps until it reads as the Milky Way; a 火樹 is a tree-shaped lantern frame covered in lights. The phrase 火樹 survives in modern Chinese for a blaze of illumination. Note that the whole world is described as unsteady — the reflection shakes, the trees sway — which is what a crowd carrying lamps does to still water.

Flutes and drums in the six streets; jade moonlight at a thousand gates; fragrant wind at ten thousand doors.

六街, the six avenues, is a stock way of saying the whole city — it comes from the ward plan of the Tang capital. Then the numbers open out: a thousand gates, ten thousand doors. In three clauses the poem has gone from the streets to the entire population, and every one of them is outdoors.

In several places the Ao-turtle peaks rise high, with fish and dragons coming out of the sea and phoenixes soaring into the sky.

The 鰲峰, or Ao-mountain, is the grandest thing at a Lantern Festival: a whole artificial mountain of lamps, named for the giant turtle that Chinese myth says carries the isles of the immortals on its back. The fish, dragons and phoenixes are lantern figures moving on it. This is a civic display costing a great deal of money, and the chapter wants you to see how much the town is putting in.

One admires the lamplight and the moonlight, and a mild good humour everywhere.

和氣融融 — a warm, easy good feeling — is the most important line in the rhapsody and the easiest to skim. The novel is telling you that this crowd is happy and harmless. Whatever is wrong in Jinping Prefecture, it is not these people.

In the ranks of silk and damask, every one delights to hear the pipes and singing.

綺羅隊 — the companies of fine silk — means the well-dressed crowd, and by convention the women in it. Lantern night was one of the few nights in the year when respectable women went out after dark in numbers, which is why so much Chinese poetry about romance is set on exactly this evening.

Carriages and horses roar past: there is no seeing the end of the fair faces and jade complexions, the gallant and the dashing, the lovely sights without limit.

看不盡 — you cannot see to the end of it — is the closing move, and it is a confession of defeat by the poem itself. Having catalogued for seven lines, it gives up and says there is more. That is the correct way to end a description of a crowd. One reading: the 不 is bú here, because the character after it is jìn, a falling tone, and 不 lifts to a rising tone in front of one.

Tripitaka and the monks looked at the lamps within their own monastery, and then went out to the eastern suburb to walk about the streets.

The party has now gone out twice and gone further the second time — from the monastery grounds into the 東關廂, the same crowded suburb they first walked through on arrival. The circle is widening one evening at a time.

It was the second watch before they turned back and went to their rest.

The night is measured in watches: 二更 is the second of the five two-hour watches into which a Chinese night was divided, so roughly nine to eleven in the evening. The reading is gēng, the night-watch, not the gèng that means "still more" — the same character, and the automatic reading takes the wrong one. They come home late and nothing has happened. That is the last time this will be true.