Pan Wan of Fuxi, styled Biren, was handsome — “a jade tree in the wind.” His wife, née Yin, was beautiful but jealous. Pan kept strictly to the women’s quarters, never a step beyond.
Pan had a villa in the Lianxi quarter, with several crabapple trees in the court. When the buds were about to open, he would gauge where his two maidens’ hairpins would be placed, go and prune the branches; when they bloomed he cut them to help her at her toilet, length and density exactly right. Yin once held a flower and smiled at Pan: “This is a flower that understands speech; it is the more charming for your hand picking it.” Thereafter she titled the crabapple “Flower Minister” and jokingly called Pan “Censor of Flowers.”
Later Pan died of a wasting sickness, and Yin wept bitterly. One day she passed the villa; the crabapples were in full bloom. Yin leaned on the rail and gazed, and was suddenly bewildered, and went home and fell deathly ill.
Yin had a cousin named Huisheng, skilled in painting, who heard and said: “This is a disease of the heart; I will cure it with a medicine of the heart.” He painted dozens of crabapple and depicted Pan bare-headed beneath them, with five or six seductive women about — one holding a flower, one sniffing one, one with a flower in hand asking Pan to pin it in her hair, one sitting on his knee and playfully throwing petals at his face. When done, he went to the bedside and asked after his sister. Yin wept and said nothing.
Huisheng said: “When my brother-in-law was alive he asked me to paint a pleasure-scroll; fearing your anger he kept it with me. Now he is buried; surely you will forgive, and I return the jade.” He gave her the painting.
Yin stared long, then her face flushed: “The faithless fellow had such doings?”
Huisheng said: “Sister, you mistake! A man three feet from the women’s curtain should leap into the clouds. Who but a Liang Boliang would keep faithfully to the brow-table? And the past is past; let it be.”
Yin, angry, said: “If so, then death was late! What do I regret?”
Huisheng pretended to persuade her and withdrew. Thereafter her heart-disease gradually lifted; within ten days she was suddenly well. She took the painting and threw it into the fire, and ordered the family, each with axe and spade, to go to the villa and cut down every crabapple tree.
The Duo comment: This is the old trick of Yuan Qian curing the Princess of Poyang. Grief just calmed, jealousy rises again — the felling of the crabapple is no different from Ruan’s wife chopping the peach. Liu Xiaobiao’s three identities, Wang Wenmu’s four fears — I know the man below the springs still trembles.
