Is my lovely cup of tea a cup of tea?
Some time ago there was an advert for, I believe, water filtration of one kind or another, in which a woman of unblemished skin and calm disposition brews herself a cup of enticingly translucent tea in a glass cup, using said water. Her equally impeccable husband, looking on jealously at her newly-steeped beverage says admiringly, "That's a lovely cup of tea". To which she archly replies, "Wrong again! It's my lovely cup of tea." (I cannot now remember the male partner's first inaccuracy that made him wrong for the second time - presumably some wrong-headed assumption about water filtration.)
Xi Feng’s Way with Words
Xi Feng, or Phoenix, is among the most compelling characters in the Hong Lou Meng. Whenever she steps into a room she dominates the scene, and even when she absent, her influence is felt throughout the two households. One reason for her dominance in the family hierarchy is her quick wit and golden tongue, which she uses with expert precision: she can tear a strip off an underling, negotiate her way to financial advantage, or have a room in stitches. Having not grown up with a classical education, Xi Feng lacks the literary allusions and clever jokes of other young ladies of the household, as Dai Yu snobbily remarks. Yet this does not hold her back in the slightest.
A certain meretricious talent
I am very much enjoying the Penguin Classics version of the Hong Lou Meng, and in particular some delightful phrases courtesy of David Hawkes' excellent translation. One of these concerns the main character of Bao Yu in Chapter 17, during a set-piece scene that pits the enfant terrible entertainingly against his disapproving father. An imperial edict has made provision for an annual visit home for all palace concubines, provided they can be received in the manner to which they are accustomed. Cue a hasty scrambling to construct what amounts to a pleasure garden in the grounds of the family estate. Bao Yu is unfortunate enough to run into his father, who takes him round with a group of literati and demands that he thinks up names and couplets for the various beauty spots they encounter.
Latest Lists – April 2022
A year has passed since the previous written update to this website, which is cause to reflect on the work that has been done in the intervening months. Leaving aside improvements in the look of the site and working out how to make things work nicely, I have added six lists since the initial Seven Worthies. These run the gamut from "common knowledge" to "fairly obscure" and have been chosen based on nothing more substantial that whatever happened to take my fancy at that particular moment. Starting with the oldest, first up is The Six Schools of Sima Tan, which [...]
Xi Kang – worthiest worthy of the bamboo grove?
blog in the grove Ji Kang - Worthiest Worthy of the Bamboo Grove? The more I learn about Ji Kang (one of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove), the more intriguing he becomes. His father died in his youth, but he rose to prominent posts in government and married into the ruling family. He shared his friend Ruan Ji's distaste for the court and it seems that he really took to heart Zhuangzi's rejection of division within society. Ji Kang disengaged from the court and joined his friends in the bamboo grove near his home.But where Ruan [...]
Seven Worthies launched
The Seven Worthies goes live The Seven Worthies site has gone live! We start with just the seven worthies themselves - the group of scholars and officials from the third century AD who assembled in a bamboo grove to discourse on philosophy away from the pressures of court life. I hope that this list of seven, which gives the site its name and is the inspiration behind it will soon be joined by many more of the exciting-sounding lists from Chinese philosophy and historiography - the eight immortals, the three kingdoms, the four treasures. There's still more to do [...]
