Qin Keqing is a character in the Twelve Books of the Red Chamber, which shows its importance, but this character was written to death by Cao Gong not long after his appearance, and he did not appear again in the following text, which is inexplicable.
According to today's texts, several texts about Qin Keqing appear to be very abrupt, she suddenly fell ill, suddenly could not be cured, suddenly died, everything seemed very unusual.
If there were no comments from Li Yanzhai, probably no one would have thought that when Cao Xueqin approved the additions and deletions of the Red Chamber, he made a wide range of deletions and modifications to Qin Keqing's plot.
Li Yanzhai said: This time there are only ten pages, delete the TianxiangLou section, and go four or five pages less. That is to say, the originally written content was as long as fourteen or five pages, but only ten pages were deleted by Cao Gong, and the entire content was cut by one-third.
Some people have questioned the authenticity of the lipogram, but regarding qin Keqing's death, the many criticisms given by li Yanzhai can prove their authenticity, and he is obviously an important insider who has seen the previous version of the deletion.
According to Qin Keqing's judgment, she was eventually hanged by hanging herself, and she was hanged on the Tianxiang Floor. However, when the original text wrote about Qin Keqing's death, there was no mention of Tianxianglou at all, and Cao Gong also created an illusion that Qin Keqing seemed to have died of illness rather than hanging himself.
But Li Pi clearly said: "Qin Keqing's obscene funeral Tianxiang Lou", the author used historical pen also. That is to say, qin Keqing's text before the deletion is a large section of the plot of Tianxianglou, and in the uncut text, Qin Keqing's way of death is consistent with his sentence, and it is all self-hanging.
But in today's texts, we can't see this kind of foreshadowing of the context, and it is obvious that Cao Gong later manipulated Qin Keqing's plot.
The only time Cao Gong wrote in detail about Tianxiang Lou was on Jia Jing's birthday, and the female relatives of Jia Fu were all listening to plays in Tianxiang Lou. Since then, Tianxianglou has also appeared twice, once after Qin Keqing's death, Jia Zhen set up an altar here, and once after Jia Jing's death, Jia Zhen set up a crane in the Tianxianglou Arrow Road to gather and gamble in the name of xi shooting.
A closer reading can also find that after Qin Keqing's death, no one in the Xianglou has ever gone up this day, and Cao Gong is also silent about it and is no longer involved. Then, why did he delete Qin Keqing's ending on a large scale?
Li Yanzhai was an insider, and there was such a paragraph in his criticism, which seemed to give the reason why Cao Gong deleted and changed Qin Keqing's ending. He said: Because the old decay has the soul to entrust the two things aftermath of sister Jia's family, is it not the one who can think of an abundance and honor? Although the matter was not leaked, its words and meanings were sadly convincing, and it was forgiven, because the words "will" and "change of clothes" were deleted from Qinxi...
This passage revealed several important information, one was that Li Yanzhai admitted that Qin Keqing had indeed done something ugly, and a "obscene funeral" was enough to prove it. There are also a few poems in the fat batch that hint at this matter: one foot is wrong, and it has been a hundred years since I turned back. Ancient and modern wind and moon, how many weeping yellow springs.
That is to say, Qin Keqing made an unforgivable mistake before she died, and it was also related to Feng Yue, and it was also this mistake that directly led to her death. In that era when a woman's fame was greater than her destiny, the young grandmother of a large family did something immoral, and she seemed to have no other way but to die.
The other is Qin Keqing's act of explaining the aftermath to Sister Mengfeng, which also greatly shocked the critics, and those descendants of the defeated families in Jia Province could not do it, and they would be credited, so he forgave Qin Keqing, so he suggested that Cao Gong delete the "ugly things" of Qin Keqing that was originally written, so that we have the version we see today.
However, the storyline of the Dream of the Red Chamber is interlocked, and the grass snake gray line is thousands of miles, and the context is more taken care of, if the plot of a certain main line character is greatly deleted, it is bound to involve the whole body, making the connection between the contexts appear abrupt, and even the behavior of the characters becomes difficult to understand. Even if you delete the key plot, it does not affect reading and understanding the whole text, but it will inevitably leave clues, because you are difficult to completely erase it, and there will always be some traces.
Therefore, when Li Yanzhai saw the deleted plot, he also made a criticism more than once: nine words to write all the things of Tianxiang Lou, not to write. He also said: Delete, but it is an undeleted pen. Also: the undeleted text of the Tianxiang Building. He also said: From this batch, it is Yu Dafa who hides how Ke Qing died.
It can be seen that regarding a large part of Qin Keqing's plot, when Cao Gong later revised the Dream of the Red Chamber, he did make a large-scale deletion, and the main reason for the deletion was that although Qin Keqing committed ugly things, her soul entrusted Fengjie with a family plan that could enable the family to multiply for a long time and not to fail, and it was inevitable that people would be moved, so they could not bear to inform the world of their ugly deeds, so they deleted and changed their endings.
But the twelve judgments have long been written, it is impossible to change all the plots related to it because of the change of the Qin ending, not only the workload is large, the past writing is not as convenient as today, it is estimated that Cao Gong also has a mind, delete its too explicit plot, the rest of the relevant hints of the plot are retained, the reader can not understand the taste, it is not something he can control.
This is equivalent to cao xueqin and li Yanzhai both know what happened to Qin Keqing's obscene funeral tianxianglou, and they know the details clearly, but they partially forgave her because of Qin Keqing's dream, leaving her with the last dignity.
Although the reader knows that this matter is not simple, and can even deduce a rough idea, but what happened specifically, no one can say for sure, and can only guess to piece together the ending. This is the compassionate heart of Li Yanzhai and probably the compassionate heart of Cao Gong, right?
Author: Xi Si Shao, this article is to read less of the original works of the Red Chamber.