The old man said, "Our poor place here is Bronze Terrace prefecture. Behind the prefectural seat there is a county, and it is called Diling — Earth's Spirit."

Two names, and the shape they make is real Ming administration: a prefecture with a county sitting behind it, each with its own seat and its own offices. The places are invented but the filing system is not, and a reader would have placed the pilgrims on the map of officialdom immediately — a middling town, well short of a capital. 敝處 — our poor place — is the polite way to name your own town to a visitor, in the same family as calling your own house a hovel. The old man is being modest about somewhere he has probably never left.

"If the elder wants a meal there is no need to go begging for it. Past this archway, on the north–south street, on the side that faces east with its back to the west, there is a tiger-crouch gatehouse. That is the Kou squire's place. Over his door hangs a board that reads, Ten Thousand Monks Not Turned Away."

The directions are a small marvel of ordinariness: an archway to pass, a street running north and south, a house on the east-facing side. Anyone who has been told how to find an address in an unfamiliar town recognises the rhythm exactly. 虎坐門樓 — a tiger-crouch gatehouse — is a broad, low, heavy-shouldered gate, the kind a family builds when it wants the street to know it has money. The word is doing the same work a wide gravel drive does now. ⚠ 員外 is the chapter's other main character and the title needs unpacking. It began as a genuine post — an official over and above the establishment — and by this period it had become something you could buy, and then simply what you called a rich man in the country who held no real office. It appears thirty-two times in this chapter. So does 齋, very nearly. Between them they are what Chapter 96 is about. ⚠ The sign is quoted here inside the inner brackets, because the old man is speaking and the sign is inside his speech. Watch what happens to those brackets two passages from now.

"A far-travelled monk like you may help himself to as much as he likes. Off with you! Off! Off! Don't break the thread of our talk."

⚠ 盡著 is read with the third tone on the first character here, not the fourth. It is the word for letting somebody have as much as they want, and it is a different word from the one that means to exhaust or use up, even though this edition writes both with the same character. The book does spell them apart elsewhere: another chapter has the identical sentence — help himself to as much as he likes — written with the other character. One word, two spellings, and the reading has to follow the word. ⚠ And then the comedy. The old man has just given faultless directions to the most generous household in the county, and he finishes by waving off a holy man from the Tang court so he can get back to arguing about dead emperors. 莫打斷我們的話頭 — don't break the thread of our talk — is a completely recognisable thing to say to somebody standing over you while you are mid-sentence. The three shooing syllables are printed as three separate sentences with an exclamation mark each. That is not emphasis; it is the sound of a hand flapping.