衠陰世界 A Poem on the Women's Country
有詩為證。詩曰：有诗为证。诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
There is a poem to bear witness. The poem says:
為證 is wéi, fixed as a collocation. The formula 有詩為證。詩曰： falls at the end of the prose source line and is hand-joined here with the sliced tag so that the introduction and the quatrain sit in one showcase passage.
The holy monk, come west to worship Buddha, reached Western Liang, a realm of unmixed yin, a world where yang runs thin.
佛 is fó corpus-wide. 衠 is zhūn, 'wholly, unadulterated' — a vernacular intensifier rare outside Yuan–Ming drama and fiction. 少 is shǎo here, 'few, scant', against the shào of 老少 four lines earlier: the same graph on both readings inside one passage-pair.
Farmer, scholar, artisan, merchant — every one of them women; fisher, woodsman, ploughman, herdsman — all in rouge and powder.
盡 is jìn. The couplet runs the two canonical four-part social taxonomies against each other: 農士工商, the four estates, and 漁樵耕牧, the four rustic callings of poetry and painting. Both are exhaustive lists, and the point of using two of them is that between them they leave nobody out.
Fair maids throng the road and cry out for the seed of men; young wives crowd the street to receive the powdered gallant.
人種 again takes zhǒng, as in the prose above. 粉郎 'the powdered gentleman' was a complimentary epithet for a handsome man; set against 人種 in the parallel position it reads with an edge, the flattering word and the breeding-stock word occupying the same slot in the couplet.
Had Wuneng not put on that hideous face of his, the siege of mist and flowers would have been past all bearing!
醜相 takes 相 as xiàng, 'appearance'. 難當 is nán + dāng, 'not to be withstood'. 不 is bú before 是. 煙花 — mist and flowers, the standing figure for the pleasure quarter — supplies the second half of the chapter's own couplet title, 心猿定計脫煙花, so the poem is quietly naming the trap the chapter is about escaping.
The quatrain does the work that the prose has carefully refused to do: it states the premise. 衠陰 — unmixed yin — is a cosmological claim, and once it is made the country stops being a curiosity and becomes a structural imbalance, a place where one of the two constituting principles of the world is simply missing. The novel is consistently interested in such places, and it usually treats them as diseased.
The middle couplet is the sharpest thing in the poem. Two exhaustive four-part lists — the four estates and the four rustic callings — are set against each other, and both come back the same. The rhetorical figure is completeness, and its effect is to close every exit: there is no corner of the social order, high or low, town or country, where the rule fails. The second line adds one further turn by putting fishermen and woodcutters in rouge, which is at once an image of total inversion and a slightly absurd one.
The closing couplet then deflates all of this into farce. After the cosmology and the taxonomies, the thing that actually saves the pilgrims is Eight Rules pulling a face. The novel does this repeatedly — raises a metaphysical register and then lets the plot be resolved at the level of a low-comedy gag — and the effect is not to mock the metaphysics but to insist that the two levels are continuous. 煙花, the last word, is lifted straight into the chapter's own title couplet, so the poem functions as a hinge: it names the danger the second half of the chapter will have to escape.