紅銅白練 Face Like Red Copper
大聖收了金箍棒，整肅衣裳，扭捏作個斯文氣象，綽下大路，徑至門前觀看。那門裡忽然走出一個老者，但見他：大圣收了金箍棒，整肃衣裳，扭捏作个斯文气象，绰下大路，径至门前观看。那门里忽然走出一个老者，但见他：
逐句解 Line by line
The Great Sage put away his gold-banded cudgel, straightened his robes, and arranged himself into a genteel bearing; then he cut down onto the main road and went straight up to the gate to look.
綽 is chāo here, standing for 抄 'to cut across, to take directly'; pypinyin gives chuò. 扭捏 is 'to affect, to put on airs' — the Great Sage is composing a respectable exterior, and the verb is faintly comic.
Out of that gateway there came all at once an old man, and this is how he looked:
但見他 introduces the verse portrait. The tag is fused into this unit rather than standing alone, and the prose line is short, so the whole line opens the showcase.
He wore a long gown of kudzu cloth, of a yellow that was not yellow and a red that was not red; on his head a cool hat of bamboo strips, of a blue that was not blue and a black that was not black.
The portrait is built entirely on the X不X frame — four pairs across two couplets, each denying the colour it has just named. 皂 zào is black. 篾 miè is a thin strip split from bamboo. Every 不 here takes mechanical sandhi on the following graph's base tone, which is why three read bù and the fourth bú.
In his hand he leaned on a bamboo staff of knotted joints, bent and yet not bent, straight and yet not straight; on his feet he trod a pair of shafted shoes, loose at the heel, new and yet not new, old and yet not old.
This line carries the chapter's only two rare graphs, side by side. The first, 𢯌, is absent from the 康熙字典 and its sole attestation anywhere in 維基文庫 is this chapter; it is read zhài on the authority of Unihan. 靸 sǎ is a shoe trodden down at the heel (康熙 革部四畫: 蘇合切，音趿，《說文》小兒履也). The second, 䩺, is wēng, the shaft of a boot (康熙 革部十畫: 烏紅切，音翁), glossed there as the Wu word for a boot-shaft — the same part named by 靿 when the local spirit appears later in this chapter. The phrase parses as 𢯌 with 靸, then 䩺 with 鞋, matching the attributive-and-noun shape of 葛布深衣, 篾絲涼帽 and 暴節竹杖 above; the boot-shaft compound recurs in chapters 67 and 70.
His face was like red copper, his beard like a length of white silk.
紅銅 is unalloyed copper, prized for its ruddy colour — and the third red thing in as many passages, after the farmstead. 練 is raw silk boiled white.
Two long brows of longevity overhung his blue-green eyes; one wide laughing mouth showed a tooth of gold.
壽眉 are the long brows of great age, held to be a mark of long life. 咍 hāi is to laugh or to gape. 碧眼 'blue-green eyes' is conventionally a marker of the strange or the foreign, and here of an old man who is more than he seems.
The portrait is constructed on a single figure repeated four times: a colour or quality named and then immediately denied. Yellow that is not yellow, red that is not red, blue that is not blue, black that is not black; a staff bent and not bent, straight and not straight; shoes new and not new, old and not old. The device is a stock one for describing the shabby, but at this density it becomes something else — a sustained refusal to let any attribute settle.
It is also a joke at the reader's expense. Set-piece verse portraits in this novel normally deliver precision: the exact fabric, the exact ornament, the exact weapon. Here the form is preserved intact — the parallelism, the couplet structure, the catalogue from hat to shoes — while the content systematically declines to specify anything. What one learns about the old man's clothes is only that they have been worn a long time.
The last two couplets abandon the device and turn concrete: red copper, white silk, long brows, blue-green eyes, a gold tooth. The shift is what makes the portrait work. After eight lines of things being neither one thing nor another, the face arrives with unusual force, and the single gold tooth in a laughing mouth is the detail the reader keeps.
This line is also the most textually difficult in the chapter. 𢯌 occurs nowhere else in 維基文庫 and is absent from the 康熙字典 altogether, while 䩺 is a regional word the dictionaries gloss as a Wu term for a boot-shaft. That a throwaway description of an old farmer's footwear should require two graphs this rare is a reminder that the 世德堂本 was set from a manuscript in a living vernacular, not composed in a standardised literary register.