A fine place it was:

好去處 — a fine place — is the cue for the longest showcase in the chapter. Three characters, and then nineteen lines of garden with no story in them at all.

The paths are laid with coloured stone, the balustrades carved from the rail. The paths are laid with coloured stone, and beside the path, at the foot of the stones, rare blossoms grow; the balustrades are carved from the rail, and outside the rail, within the fence, strange flowers spring up.

The rhapsody's method — it runs in matched pairs of lines rather than to a fixed length, and it does not rhyme throughout — is announced in its first three lines: state a pair, then take each half of the pair and open it out. Four characters, four characters — then the same four characters again with a clause hung on them. It is the oldest trick in this kind of Chinese writing and it works like a camera pulling back. First you are told there is a path. Then you are shown what is growing beside it. 長 here is zhǎng, to grow — and the matching line puts 生 in the same position to prove it.

The delicate peach blurs into kingfisher-green; the tender willow flashes with orioles. A step, and you notice a hidden fragrance filling your sleeves; a pace, and a clean savour has settled thick on your clothes.

The first two lines are pure colour — pink peach against green, and the yellow flicker of an oriole in a willow. Then the poem does something better and puts the reader inside it. 步覺幽香來袖滿 — you take a step and find the scent has got into your sleeves. Nobody is described smelling anything; the sleeves simply fill. It is the difference between being told a garden is fragrant and being made to walk through one.

The phoenix terrace and the dragon pool, the bamboo lodge and the pine gallery. Above the phoenix terrace, a flute is played and the phoenixes come in state; in the dragon pool, the fish are reared and turn to dragons and go.

The same open-out pattern, and both halves are stories. The flute is Xiao Shi's: he played so well that phoenixes came down to listen, and the Duke of Qin gave him his daughter, and in the end the two of them rode away on the birds. It is the standard image for a marriage made in music, and it is sitting in a garden four days before a wedding. The fish is the carp that swims up the Yellow River and leaps the Dragon Gate and becomes a dragon — which has meant passing the imperial examinations for most of a thousand years, and is still what Chinese parents mean by it.

The bamboo lodge has its poems, where White Snow was cut at the cost of endless polishing; the pine gallery its collected essays, where pearl and jade were weighed and notes set down in the green-bound books.

Two lines about the labour of writing, in the middle of a garden. 白雪 is short for a famously difficult old melody that almost nobody in the capital could sing along to — it has meant high art with a small audience ever since. 推敲, here rendered as endless polishing, is the Chinese word for exactly that: it comes from a poet who could not decide between push and knock in a line, rode into a passing official while brooding on it, and got the answer from him. The word is still the ordinary term for working a sentence over.

The rockery's piled stones are green, the winding water's ripples deep. The peony arbour and the rose trellis, heaped brocade and spread velvet; the jasmine rail and the crabapple bed, banked cloud and inlaid jade.

曲水 is qū, winding — the artificial meandering stream that was a standard feature of a scholar's garden, built so that wine cups could be floated down it from guest to guest. The flowers arrive in pairs, and each pair is finished off with two words for costly cloth or stone. This is what Chinese rhapsody does with a garden: it converts it into treasure. 鋪 is pū throughout, to spread something out flat — all seven of this chapter's uses are that same verb.

The peonies are strangely scented, the hollyhocks marvellously bright. White pear and red apricot contend in their sweetness; purple orchid and golden daylily strive in their blaze.

The catalogue turns competitive. 鬥 and 爭 — contend and strive — make the flowers rivals, which is an old convention and a slightly ominous one to run at length in the chapter where two women are about to be told apart. 金萱, the golden daylily, is the flower of mothers in Chinese: it was planted at the north side of a house, where the mistress lived, and a man writing about his mother says the daylily hall.

Poppy, magnolia and azalea, tender and glowing; banana-shrub, balsam and plantain-lily, trembling and towering.

Six flowers in two lines, three to a side, each list closed by a doubled pair of words. 夭夭灼灼 is a quotation and a very old one. It comes from the wedding song in the Book of Songs about the peach tree in blossom and the girl going to her new home, and it has meant a bride ever since. Dropped into a flower catalogue it looks like ordinary description. It is not: the poem is announcing a wedding, in the garden of the man who does not want one.

Everywhere the red is flushed through, rich as rouge; every clump is thick with scent and ringed in brocade. Better still, the east wind brings the warm days round again, and the whole garden's loveliness puts out its light.

The rhapsody ends by pulling back to take in the lot. 一處處 and 一叢叢 — place after place, clump after clump — are the doubling used to mean everywhere you look. And the last line brings in the east wind, which in Chinese is always the spring wind and always the one that starts things growing. The garden is at its peak. So, the poem is saying, is the season, and so is the moment for a marriage. One word here is printed oddly. The warm of 回煖日 is written with a fire at its left, and that spelling occurs nowhere else in all hundred chapters. This chapter writes the same word the ordinary way three times over, the nearest of them 紅爐暖 two hundred and ninety-six characters further on. The edition disagrees with itself and the text as printed is kept.