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8 Eating and Drinking in a Red Chambered Dream Louise Edwards Cao Xueqin’s 㚡暒剡ġ mid-Qing masterpiece, The Story of the Stone or The Red Chamber Dream (Honglou mengġ 䲭㦻⣊), is frequently referred to as a treasure of China’s ‘food and drink culture’ 梚梇㔯⊾.1 Celebrated as the great classic Chinese novel of manners, Honglou meng provides readers a rich scope in which to appreciate the culinary luxuries of mid-Qing aristocratic life. Throughout the novel’s 120 chapters readers are introduced to over 180 different types of foodstuffs and beverages described through dozens of meals and banquets ranging from simple snacks and invalid meals to elaborate banquets. Previous scholarship has celebrated Cao Xueqin’s skill in capturing the glory of mid-Qing China’s cuisine and his remarkable talent for describing elite class rituals and manners relating to food and wine but failed to do justice to the deeper, symbolic role that food and drink perform in the novel. Honglou meng’s intricate descriptions of food and drink are more than mere decorative details that confirm the opulence of the Jia mansions and the privilege of its residents.2 Kam-ming Wong reminds us that in the first chapter of the novel Cao challenges readers to analyse his ‘idle words’ with a gourmet’s metaphor: ‘Who can fathom their taste?’ 婘妋℞ᷕ␛?3 This chapter shows how Cao Xueqin used food and beverages to mark boundaries between the pure and the profane in the Jia mansions’ key symbolic space—Prospect Garden ⣏奨⚺. The temporal and unstable division between purity and profanity stands at the core of the novel’s moral message as the garden, created as a realm of youthful, feminine purity, is penetrated by the pollution of the adult world’s masculine dominance.4 The corruption of the garden sanctuary is inevitable as Keith McMahon explains in his work on Qing fiction ‘the excess of purity or insularity invites an opposite excess of transgression’.5 In previous research I have outlined the roles sex, age, space, and art play in the novel in signalling shifts in the distinction between purity and profanity.6 This chapter extends that framework to examine the mechanisms by which food and drink mark the pollution of the protected world of Prospect Garden. It argues that Cao Xueqin provided readers with keys presaging the dismantling of the 114 Scribes of Gastronomy garden sanctuary and the decline of the Jia family through his depiction of food and drink and in his discussions about their exchange and consumption.7 Building the Moral Boundaries of the Jia Mansions through Food and Drink In Chapter 16, the Rong branch of the Jia clan receives word from the Palace that their eldest daughter, Jia Yuanchun 屰⃫㗍, earlier elevated to the status of Imperial Concubine, will be making a rare, indeed unprecedented, visit home to see her family. The entire Jia clan is immediately mobilized to prepare for the visitation. A section of land adjoining the Rong mansions and those of the senior branch, the Ning mansions, is set aside for the construction of an elaborate garden that will house Yuanchun during her single evening visit home. After her visit, she sends word that the novel’s young male protagonist, Jia Baoyu 屰 ⮞䌱, and his female cousins are to live in the garden and, accordingly, a new structure of household organization forms around this relocation from Chapter 23 onwards. In the process Cao Xueqin establishes the division between femininity , youth and purity and masculinity, age and pollution that will frame the moral order of his novel. As the designated residence of the unmarried girls and Jia Baoyu, Prospect Garden is to be protected from the impurities of the outside world. Older women household employees serve as gatekeepers monitoring people entering and exiting the garden. Baoyu, an effeminate and gentle boy known for his reverence of girls and loathing of men and married women, is the only male allowed into the garden. If workmen are required to enter this place of purity, the resident girls are reminded to stay indoors and, should they need to move between buildings, to use the specially screened walkways designed to protect the girls’ modesty. The garden is a world of youthful, feminine purity in keeping with Baoyu’s philosophy of life that ‘the pure essence of humanity was all concentrated in the female of the species and that males were its mere dregs and off-scourings’ (1.20.407–8) and that once married, women can become ‘worse than the men...

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