Truly it was a case of:

The three-character hinge that hands the narrative over to verse. The storyteller stops describing and starts performing, and the audience knows a set piece is coming.

Slender and swaying, jade of flesh and ice of skin. / Pair upon pair, they put the girls of Chu to shame; couple upon couple, their beauty outdid Xi Shi.

The rhapsody proper begins — a rhapsody being one of those long, unrhymed showpieces the storyteller drops into the prose when he wants to stop the clock and dazzle. This one is a stock catalogue, the palace-beauty set piece, and its job is to be overwhelming. It comes in couplets — a couplet being a matched pair of lines, same shape and same number of beats in each half, which is how Chinese verse builds nearly everything. The two comparisons here are the standard pair. The girls of Chu are the court beauties of the southern kingdom in the old poems, famous because their king liked slender waists so much that his courtiers starved themselves. Xi Shi is the most famous beautiful woman in Chinese history, sent as a living weapon to distract an enemy king, which worked. So both halves of the couplet reach for beauty that brought a kingdom down. In a scene about a king who cannot see the danger in his own palace, that is not decoration.

Cloud-coiffures piled high, with coloured phoenixes in flight; moth-eyebrows faintly drawn, like distant hills lying low.

Two set descriptions, both so old they had become single words. 雲髻 is the piled-up cloud coiffure, hair built high and held with phoenix ornaments. 蛾眉 means moth-eyebrows: eyebrows arched fine and dark like a moth's antennae, which sounds strange in English and was the highest compliment available in Chinese for about two thousand years. The distant hills are the other half of the standard comparison — the eyebrow drawn low and long like a range of hills on the horizon. Chinese painters used the same brush stroke for both, which is where the comparison comes from.

Reed-pipes and mouth-organs sounding their elegant measures, flutes and drums struck up again and again. / Gong, shang, jue, zhi, yu — high and low, rising and falling, all in accord.

The five notes of the old Chinese scale, named in order, the way English might run do-re-mi. Two of them are traps for the unwary reader. The third note, 角, is jué — and the everyday sense of that character, a horn or a corner, is a different word said another way. The fourth note, 徵, is zhǐ; the everyday sense, to summon or to levy, is again a different word. Both are separate words that happen to be spelled with the same character, and the line right after them, about pitch rising and falling, confirms which sense is meant. The five notes match the five phases and the five directions in the old correspondences, so naming all five is a way of saying the music is complete — everything under heaven is in tune. Which, in this palace, it is not.

Pure song and exquisite dancing, forever a delight; brocade-paved and flower-clustered, colour on colour, a pleasure to the eye.

The rhapsody closes on the two words it has been building towards — 愛, to love or delight in, and 怡, to be pleased. Both are about the effect on the watcher rather than the thing watched. That is the setup. The verse has spent six lines establishing that this room is designed to be irresistible, and the next line tells you it did not work.

Pilgrim, seeing that his master was not stirred by any of it, smacked his lips and praised him under his breath: "Good monk! Good monk! His body dwells among brocade and embroidery and his heart holds no desire; his feet tread on jasper and jade and his mind is not led astray."

The verdict, and it is the whole reason the rhapsody was there. Wukong is not usually the one handing out spiritual report cards — he is normally the one being scolded. Here the order reverses, and his praise is offered in a neat parallel couplet, which is the book's way of saying he means it seriously. 咂嘴 is a lovely small detail: it means to smack the lips or click the tongue, the noise you make when something impresses you. He is genuinely admiring, and he is doing it quietly so his master will not hear.