That night, at the third or fourth watch, every servant with a job to do was up early, buying in the various things needed.

⚠ 三四更 is the night watch — the third or fourth of the five the night was divided into, so somewhere between eleven at night and three in the morning. The plain reading gives the adverb meaning more or further instead. And 更深 in the poem, fourteen characters earlier, comes out right without any help at all. Verse gets it; prose does not. ⚠ The poem has just put a whole town to bed. One sentence later this house is awake in the dark, buying provisions.

Look at them: the ones laying the feast, rushing about the kitchen; the ones setting the flags, making a din in the front hall; the ones fetching the monks and the priests, both legs going; the ones calling the band, leaping about; the ones delivering the cards, running east and west; the ones getting the sedans and horses ready, shouting up and answering down.

⚠ Six clauses in one shape: each names a job, then how it looked or sounded. Five of them run to exactly eight characters and the first carries a three-character lead-in — look at them — before dropping into the same pattern. It is the construction the marketplace scene used for a crowd, turned on a household: not one servant hurrying but a whole staff hurrying, all at once, in six directions. ⚠ And every single one of the six is carrying out an instruction from the previous passage. Feast, flags, clergy, musicians, cards, transport — Kou Hong's order list, executed in the dark, in the order he gave it. ⚠ Three of the six short clauses need a hand ruling: the musicians again, the cards again, and 上呼下應 — calls above and answers below — where the word means to answer a call and the plain reading gives the level tone, which is a different word meaning ought.

That half of a night they kept up the racket right through until daylight, and by about the hour of si everything was finished — which was nothing but a matter of having money.

⚠⚠ 也只是有錢不過 is the narrator's verdict and it is six characters of pure dryness: it was nothing but having money. The phrase occurs once in the whole novel. ⚠ Read it against what it is describing. A hundred cards delivered overnight, a banquet, twenty pairs of flags, hired musicians, two companies of clergy, sedans and horses — everything a great send-off needs, put together between midnight and mid-morning by a household shouting at itself in the dark. ⚠ And the book's comment on all of it is that this is what money does. Not that it was wicked, or wasted, or hollow. Just that there is no mystery in it. The same chapter that opened by arguing merit cannot be counted closes its longest description of effort by pointing out what paid for it.