A dream of red mansions is also called twelve women in Jinling. Twelve Women in Jinling is the title of a new book written by Cao Xueqin after ten years of mourning for Hongxuan. As far as these five words are concerned, it is divided into three paragraphs, which shows that what seems simple in A Dream of Red Mansions is actually not simple. For example, "Jinling" is known as the ancient name of Nanjing. This is very simple. Do you need any explanation? This is a common view that it is not bad. However, if you think deeply, you will find that reading A Dream of Red Mansions and simplifying all the important words will hurt the disease of simplification, so there is no need to study and discuss anything.
I'll just give you an example. The second time, Jia Yucun told Leng Zixing about his experience: "Jia Zhen, president of the Institute of Physical Education of Jinling Province, was an imperial envoy of Jinling City ..." It can be seen that in Jia Yucun's mind, "Jinling" is the name of a province, and a province is the name of a geographical administrative system since the Yuan Dynasty. The full name is "province in the line", or "province" for short. This regional administrative system continues to this day. In this case, the whole province is a big region, not just a Nanjing city. Isn't it clear?
To say the least, during the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, Jiangsu and Anhui were a large area called Jiangnan Taiwan. Therefore, when Cao Jia was appointed as the weaving official in Nanjing, he was originally called Jiangnan Weaving Supervisor and later renamed Jiangning, which is the proper name of Nanjing today. Then, you will suddenly realize that the so-called "Jinling Province" should at least be equivalent to the jiangnan province I just said. Here are a few small proofs that need to be mentioned. When Baoyu was wandering in the dreamland, he asked the police fairy, "As the saying goes, Jinling is big, why are there only twelve women?" Now there are hundreds of girls in our family alone, up and down. "The tone here refers to a province rather than a city. When Daiyu entered Jia's house for the third time, Xifeng came to see Daiyu, and Grandmother Jia said with a smile, "You don't know him. She is a famous rascal here, and the southern province is famous for its peppers. "There is also a word" province ".
But the trouble doesn't stop there. Gu, a great scholar in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, called fangshan county, west of Beijing "Jinling" when writing a book. What's going on here? It turns out that in the Song Dynasty, the emperors of the northern rival Jin Dynasty were all buried in Fangshan, so Jinling written by Gu and Jinling in the south of the Yangtze River are two different things. Fangshan also has the ancestral grave of Li (the dream home of the red chamber, that is, Xiangyun's family), which is very large. There are their own family members who look after the grave, and there is a descendant of the clan, with a large number. In addition, in Shenyang in the northeast, there is the "Jin State" in the late Ming Dynasty, that is, the mausoleum of Nurhachi and his queen, which is called Fuling, and historians also call it Jinling. Therefore, it seems that the twelve women in Jinling don't all refer to Jiangsu people, but also include Fangshan in Beijing today and Shenyang in Liaoning, which are closely related to the ancestors of Cao and Li in history. If you can think of this, then your understanding of the concept of twelve women in Jinling may be different from the past, right?