Jia Qiaojie is a character in the novel Dream of the Red Chamber and one of the Twelve Beauties of Jinling. Wikidata's Chinese label and the Chinese Wikipedia article title are both Jia Qiaojie, and it is her name in the book, so the heading stays the same. She is the daughter of Wang Xifeng and Jia Lian, and Wikidata records the setting as the dynasty of the novel.[1][2]
Her naming and childhood
According to the Chinese Wikipedia article, in the first eighty chapters by Cao Xueqin Qiaojie is still young, so her personality and traits are not clear. All the book tells us is that she is a sickly child and that Wang Xifeng asked the old, poor Granny Liu to name her in the hope of holding the illness down. Because she was born on the seventh of the seventh month, the Qiqiao festival, Granny Liu named her Qiaojie, meaning to fight poison with poison.[2]
Several accounts of her fate
The article says that in Gao E's continuation, after the Jia house is ruined Qiaojie is nearly sold to a prince as a concubine, but Granny Liu rescues her at once. This is only a false alarm, a repayment for Wang Xifeng's help to Granny Liu long before, and Qiaojie is later married off, by Granny Liu's arrangement, to the son of a country landowner. Hongxue scholars, however, argue that she should have married Granny Liu's grandson Banr. The article says her verse and the Zhiyan zhai comments show that after the Jia house fell she was sold into a brothel by her cruel uncle and treacherous brother, who forgot kinship, and some time later Granny Liu rescued her out of loyalty, after which she married Banr and lived all her life as a village woman. The picture in the main register of the Twelve Beauties shows a beauty weaving at a lonely village inn, who is Qiaojie.[2]
Verse and song
The article gives her fate verse, which says that when power fails there is no talk of nobility, that when the family is ruined there is no talk of kin, and that by chance she helped Mrs Liu and by luck met a benefactor. It also lists the song Leaving a Surplus of Blessings, which urges helping the needy and not to be like the cruel uncle and treacherous brother who forgot their own flesh and blood out of love of money.[2]