The Little Shopkeeper of Dream of the Red Chamber: Making Money at the Rong Mansion

When Chunyan, a third-class maid in charge of the fires, was beaten to death in the Rongguo Mansion's kitchen, she clutched the “stolen silver” Zhao Yiniang had slipped her, trembling. She had stood up for a little maid and ended up taking the fall.

When she opened her eyes again, she was back on the night before Granny Ma used witchcraft to curse Baoyu. This time, Chunyan gritted her teeth and swore: In this life, no one would ever push her around again!

So what if she was only a kitchen maid? She had the business smarts of a modern little restaurant. She carved discarded peach pits into figurines and paired them with osmanthus cakes as “samples,” selling them for one wen apiece and earning the monthly wages of the rough-serving maids. She understood “KPI assessments,” using her meticulous accounts to force the kitchen manager, who had been skimming the purchasing budget, to his knees. And she knew “blind-box marketing,” turning Xiangyun's purse and Tanchun's poetry fan into a “solve a poem riddle to win an embroidered handkerchief” game that had the young ladies of the Jia household flocking to her.

From kitchen helper to head manager of the garden, from “little restaurant owner” to “master of the workshops,” Chunyan's money-making ventures went from strength to strength. But who could have guessed that her “small business” would catch the attention of Prince Zhongshun's household, anger Madam Xing, and even earn unreserved praise from Grandmother Jia for the colored-glass lantern she made herself?