Gao Shun Quotes

The request is comic because it is necessary. Gao Shun has carried the poisoned soup to Maomao wrapped in cloth, on Jinshi's instructions, and when she stares at it a moment too long his worry comes out as an order. She was not planning to drink it, she says, then explains that the silver bowl has oxidized, so the broth will no longer taste good. He catches the phrase at once: "taste good"? They are talking of the poisoned soup. His alarm is well founded. The volume opens with Gyokuyo's ladies ordering Maomao back to bed after she spat out poison (p. 6), and near the preview's end she thinks she wishes she had drunk it all down (p. 37). The joke works because the careful official is the only person in the room treating poison as a danger.

He asks after Maomao has laid out her whole reading of the banquet. Consort Lishu's own food taster switched the bowls to bully her mistress; whoever touched the rim, Maomao believes, added the poison; and she has no way of telling whether the bullying and the poisoner are related. His question moves from the case to her. It is also the question a suspicious official ought to ask, since a food taster who covered for someone at a poisoning has something to explain. He insists he is only curious, and she answers that a lady-in-waiting's life is worth far less than a consort's. Gao Shun takes that without comment and says he will fully explain the situation to Sir Jinshi, and only then does Maomao bow and thank him. Curiosity, in his hands, ends in a report she is grateful for.