Episode 35 Rereading Hong lou meng 紅樓夢, Chapter 18 part 1/4

Imperial Concubine Yuanchun returns home to visit family, to see the garden constructed in her honor, to review and edit the names and couplets assigned to all of the most famous spots, and to hear the celebratory, yet serious, poems everyone has written for the occasion. We begin by discussing temporal discrepancies in this chapter, exploring the relationship between logical contradiction and the oblique logic of dreaming. What does it mean to live in a gilded cage, a shimmering space of ritual and power? And why isn’t musk popular anymore? 

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