It was for all the world like:

The second formula cue of the chapter, handing over to a second rhapsody. The first one described a room being perfect. This one describes a garden being destroyed.

Spring winds sweeping wide, autumn air sighing thin. / Spring winds sweeping wide across the garden groves, and a thousand blossoms shaken loose; / autumn air sighing thin into the forbidden park, and ten thousand leaves adrift.

The verse opens with a four-character pair and then unpacks each half into a longer line — a standard rhapsody move, like stating a theme and then playing it. The two seasons are doing opposite work. Spring wind shakes flowers off; autumn air strips leaves. Together they say: everything that grows here is coming down, whatever season it thinks it is in. 禁苑 is the forbidden park, the walled imperial garden that only the royal household may enter. The word carries the same prohibition as the Forbidden City. It is being wrecked.

Peonies snapped off, tilting below the railings; herbaceous peonies blown crooked, lying along the balustrade. / Lotus at the pond's edge tossed and shaken; chrysanthemum petals heaped and strewn on the terrace steps.

The catalogue of ruined flowers begins. Every one named is a garden flower of status, not a wildflower — this is a collection being destroyed, not a field. The two peonies are different plants and the distinction was worth money. 牡丹 is the tree peony, the king of flowers, the imperial bloom of the Tang. 芍藥 is the herbaceous peony, its slightly less exalted cousin. A Ming reader would have felt the pairing the way a modern reader reads a list of expensive cars. ⚠ 鋪 is pū, to spread out, the verb — not pù, a shopfront. It turns up twice in this rhapsody and both are the verb.

Crab-apple, all strength gone, toppling into the dust; roses, their scent still on them, bedded down in the wild. / Spring wind snapping the water-caltrop and the lotus stems; winter snow bearing down and bending the plum's tender buds.

⚠ 倒 here is dǎo, to topple over — not dào, to reverse or invert. Same character, and the difference is whether the crab-apple falls down or turns upside down. Winter arrives in the fourth line. The rhapsody has now run spring, autumn and winter through a single garden in the space of eight lines, which is not describing weather. It is describing a year's worth of damage happening at once. The crab-apple 海棠 is conventionally the sleeping beauty of Chinese flower poetry — there is a famous story of an emperor comparing a drowsy consort to one. Having it lose all its strength and fall in the dust is a pointed choice in a scene where a consort has just been exposed as false.

Pomegranate petals scattered in confusion through the inner courtyards, east and west; / willow withes along the bank hanging slantwise about the palace, north and south.

Two long lines that widen the frame. Up to now the damage has been flower by flower; here it spreads across the whole compound in all four directions. The pomegranate is the fertility flower — it is heaped with seeds, and it was given at weddings for exactly that reason. Its petals are on the ground. The willow is the parting tree: travellers were seen off with a broken willow withe, because the word for willow sounds like the word for stay. Having the willows hang slantwise over the palace at a wedding that is not going to happen is the storyteller putting his thumb on the scale.

Fine flowers, and one wild night of wind and rain: numberless fallen petals carpeting the ground like brocade.

The closing line, and the only one that steps back to say what all of it meant. 殘紅, remnant red, is the standard poetic word for fallen petals — not petals but the red that is left over. 地錦 is ground-brocade: the fallen flowers make a patterned carpet. The brocade closes a circle. The first rhapsody of this chapter ended on 錦砌花團, brocade paving and clustered flowers, describing a room arranged to perfection. Four hundred characters later the same two words are on the floor, torn off and trodden.

Tripitaka completely lost his head; shaking all over, he threw his arms around the king and could only cry: "Your Majesty, don't be afraid, don't be afraid! This is my unruly disciple using his powers to tell the true from the false."

Back to the room, and to a wonderfully undignified picture: the holy man from the Great Tang clutching a foreign king and repeating don't be afraid while visibly terrified himself. 頑徒 — unruly disciple, stubborn apprentice — is Tripitaka's usual word for Wukong when apologising for him to strangers. It manages to be an apology and a complaint at once. And notice what he actually says. He does not say the princess is a demon. He says his disciple is testing which is which — leaving the king, for another few moments, still the father of a bride.