The Baguenaudier

What the "Nine Linked Rings" refer to

The Baguenaudier

The passage we looked at yesterday contained a somewhat unusual word that is pretty hard to translate to English:

誰知此時黛玉不在自己房裡，卻在寶玉房中，大家解「九連環」作戲。

Who would have thought that Daiyu wasn’t in her own room? Instead, she was in Jia Baoyu’s room, where the two of them were trying to solve a “nine linked rings” puzzle.

The difficult term here is 九連環. David Hawkes calls it “metal puzzles.” The Yangs call it “nine ring puzzles.”

Actually, 九連環 looks something like this:

And, of course, it’s pretty interesting that Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu wind up trying to solve one of these intricate and extremely complex puzzles.