Third Daughter Tanchun: Countdown to the Jia Family's Bankruptcy

Everyone said the Jia family was "a house of poetry, propriety, and noble rank, a family of bells and bronze cauldrons."

Only Tanchun saw the holes in the account books.

The third young lady, born to a concubine and living in Autumn Refreshing Studio, worked her abacus night after night. She wasn't tallying rouge and powder, but every deficit in the Jia family accounts: five hundred thousand taels spent on Grand Consort Yu's homecoming visit in a single night; annual income of ten thousand against annual spending of thirty thousand; the names of dead people still collecting their monthly allowances; and the private garden of Lai Momo, a mere servant, yielding more income each year than one of her masters' estates.

She began a countdown.

When Wang Xifeng fell ill, Tanchun took up the seal and began managing the household. She introduced a contract system in the Grand View Garden and issued "Fourteen Reform Measures," cutting redundant staff, auditing land rents, and limiting banquets. She meant to save the family.

But her reforms threatened everyone's interests. The procurement managers paid lip service while resisting her orders, Wang Furen planted informants, Baochai urged her to show some consideration, and Baoyu asked why she had to take it all so seriously. Aunt Zhao publicly turned on her over twenty taels for funeral expenses: "You came out of my womb!"

During the search of the Grand View Garden, Tanchun slapped Wang Shanbao's wife across the face and said through her tears, "A centipede may die, but it won't fall over. To bring a family to ruin, it must first destroy itself from within!"

She could balance every account, but she couldn't calculate that the Jia family's sky was destined to fall.

Married off to a distant land across the sea, she received the terrible news. She opened the old account book and wrote A Record of the Rise and Fall of the Jia Family:

"The Jia family did not fall because of greed, nor because of extravagance. It fell because of the system on which it depended for survival."

A talented woman, an account book, and the autopsy report of a grand mansion.

The more capable she was, the clearer her vision. The clearer her vision, the more despairing she became.