金吾不禁 The Watch Does Not Stop You
有詩為證。詩曰：有诗为证。诗曰：
此時正是金吾不禁，亂烘烘的，無數人煙。有那跳舞的，屣蹺的，裝鬼的，騎象的，東一攢，西一簇，看之不盡。此时正是金吾不禁，乱烘烘的，无数人烟。有那跳舞的，屣跷的，装鬼的，骑象的，东一攒，西一簇，看之不尽。
逐句解 Line by line
There are verses to prove it.
有詩為證 is the storyteller's formula for producing a poem as evidence, and it is never quite serious. The rhapsody has just run for twenty-five lines; the four-line quatrain that follows is a summing-up, not a proof.
The poem says:
Two graphs to hand off to verse. The chapter uses three different cues for this — 但見那, 正是 and now 詩曰 — and this is the most formal of them.
In the brocade arena they sing the Coloured Lotus; within the borders of peace the crowds cluster thick.
錦繡場 — the brocade arena — is the festival ground seen as a performance space, and 彩蓮 is a song-and-dance turn of the period. 太平境內, within the borders of peace, is the quatrain's real subject: this is what a well-governed place looks like.
Lamps bright and moon clear on the Lantern Night; wind and rain in season, and a year of plenty.
The couplet that says what the festival is for. 雨順風調 — rain timely and wind tempered — is the standing wish of every farming society, and here it is what the lamps are believed to buy. The novel writes the pair both ways round as the metre requires; the order most readers will know it in is 風調雨順. A reading: 調 is tiáo, well-tempered, not diào, to transfer or investigate. The automatic reading takes the wrong one, and getting it right pulls the neighbouring 不 with it two lines later.
At this hour the watch was indeed not stopping anyone; all was noise and bustle, and people beyond counting.
The one line that explains why the whole town is out of doors. 金吾 was the officer of the imperial guard who enforced the night curfew, and 金吾不禁 — the watch does not forbid it — is the set phrase for the handful of nights each year when the curfew was lifted and a Chinese city could stay out until dawn. It is the whole social fact of the Lantern Festival in four graphs.
There were dancers, and stilt-walkers, and men got up as ghosts, and men riding elephants; a cluster over here, a crowd over there, more than one could see.
The street entertainment, itemised. 屣蹺 is stilt-walking, still a fixture of Chinese festivals; 裝鬼 is dressing as a ghost. Two readings: 攢 is cuán, clustered, and the 不 of 看之不盡 is bú, because the graph after it is baked jìn, a falling tone.
A short bridging passage that does two jobs. The quatrain sums up the rhapsody and names what the lamps are believed to be for: 雨順風調大有年, wind and rain in season and a year of plenty. That is not decoration. The whole apparatus of this festival — the oil, the towers, the money — rests on a belief that lighting it buys good weather and a harvest.
Then the passage explains why the town is outdoors at all. 金吾不禁, the watch does not stop you, is a set phrase about the curfew: an officer of the guard normally cleared the streets at nightfall, and on a handful of nights each year he did not. That is what a Lantern Festival was — not merely lights, but permission. Everyone in Jinping is out because for three nights they are allowed to be.