And this is what was there:

但見那 — the last cue in the chapter, and the fourth time these three characters have stopped the story to make room for a set-piece. It stands as its own short unit in the edition, which is why it is its own segment here rather than being folded into the sentence in front of it.

Curtains hung high; screens standing all around.

The fourth and last of the chapter's long descriptive pieces, and it opens the way the other three did — flat, no verbs, furniture first. By now the reader knows the shape and can feel the room being built.

In the very middle hung a painting of the Hill of Longevity and the Sea of Blessing; along the two walls were ranged four scrolls of the four seasons.

壽山福海 — long life like the hills, blessing like the sea — is a set phrase for a birthday or a celebration, and hanging it in the middle of the room tells every guest what the occasion is supposed to be. And it is not, strictly, what the occasion is. This is a farewell for a man who wants to leave. Kou Hong has dressed his hall for a celebration of long life, which is what he was buying with the Medicine Buddha's lamps three days ago.

In the dragon-figured tripod, incense drifted in mist; in the magpie-tail censer, lucky vapour rose.

鵲尾爐 — the magpie-tail censer — is a real object: a handled incense burner with a long tapering grip, named for the shape. It occurs once in the whole novel, and so does the dragon-figured tripod beside it. Both are the kind of thing a household brings out for show.

Display plates clustered with colour, jewelled ornaments bright in every shade;

看盤 means a look-at plate — food arranged to be admired rather than eaten, set at the front of a formal table. The word says so outright, which is more honest than most cuisines manage.

tables ranged and heaped with gold, sugar lions and sugar immortals set out in their rows.

獅仙糖 are sugar sculptures — lions and immortals moulded in sugar and set along a banquet table. They are not the novelist's invention: moulded sugar figures were a standard luxury at Ming feasts, made by specialists and displayed rather than eaten. So the two lines together are about display, twice over. Food to be looked at, and then sculpture made of food. This is the most expensive thing in the chapter and none of it is dinner.

Before the steps, drumming and dancing keeping to the notes; in the hall, fruit and dishes spread out like brocade.

宮商 are the first two notes of the old five-note scale, used together as shorthand for music in tune. The previous chapter had all five of them in a row and two of the five were read wrong — a phrase found once in the whole book, which slipped past every automatic check and was caught by reading the line. These two are the safe end of the same set. 鋪錦繡 — spread like brocade — is the fifth and last of the chapter's five verbs that the plain reading keeps turning into a shop.

Plain soup and plain rice, remarkably fine; fragrant wine and fragrant tea, and much that was lovely.

Wine, at a meatless feast for Buddhist monks. The rule forbids it, and the line puts it in a matched pair with tea as though there were nothing to discuss. It is probably formula rather than scandal — wine and tea go together in this kind of verse the way salt and pepper do — but the chapter has already hired Daoist priests for a Buddhist send-off and had a hermit's fly-whisk hanging in the sutra hall. This household's holiness is not tidy, and the book keeps declining to tidy it.

Though it was only a commoner's house, it fell no way short of a prince's mansion.

雖然是百姓之家，卻不亞王侯之宅 is the line the whole rhapsody exists for, and it is the same claim the first rhapsody made about the chapel: a private man's rooms outdoing the institutions. Said of a chapel it was a compliment about devotion. Said of a banqueting hall it is a statement about money — and the narrator will make that explicit in six characters at the end of the previous passage's night's work.

Nothing to be heard but one great wave of merriment — truly enough to shake heaven and earth.

The rhapsody ends on sound, exactly as the first one did. There the last line was a single stroke on a chime and the note hanging in the air. Here it is a hall full of people making a noise loud enough to shake the world. The two endings are as far apart as the chapter can put them, and they are describing rooms in the same house, a fortnight apart. Something has changed about what Kou Hong's generosity sounds like.