The sensitive Crimson Pearl fairy-herb
The female lead of Dream of the Red Chamber, an orphan girl lodged in the Jia house, brimming with talent yet frail and sickly, tender and easily grieved. Legend says she was in a former life a Crimson Pearl fairy-herb, and to repay Baoyu’s watering in that past life, in this one she must "pay back a lifetime of tears." She and Baoyu are soulmates, but no match for the family’s cold calculation, and she dies of grief on the very night Baoyu weds another. The scene of "Daiyu burying flowers" is one of the most sorrowfully beautiful images in Chinese literature.
Seeing fallen blossoms drift down, Lin Daiyu cannot bear to have them trampled, so she gathers them in a silk pouch and buries them in the earth, chanting the "Song of Burying Flowers" as she weeps: "Others laugh that I, burying flowers, am a fool — who, in years to come, will bury me?" She buries flowers, but mourns her own drifting, rootless fate, her youth about to pass. The scene carries a girl’s sensitivity to the fleetingness of life to its very extreme.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.