One for readers of Chinese!

Among the ritual manuals of the Li family Daoists, the final page of Li Qing’s Xiewu ke gives this ingenious poem about the Eight Immortals, each pair of “characters” making up a seven-word line (4 +3):

鐘離鉆石把扇搖
果老騎驢趙州橋
洞濱負劍清風客
國舅瑤池玉品簫
彩和手執雲楊板
拐李先生得高道
仙姑來俸長生酒
相子花籃獻蟠桃

This is nothing to do with their ritual practice. Though the composite characters may look at first sight like talismans, any cultured reader would enjoy reading (and deciphering) the poem.

Li Manshan enjoys such word games, and puts me onto others like this:

to be read thus:

半夜三更門半開
小姐等到月西斜 [1]
山高路遠無口信
哭斷肝腸少人来

Meanwhile over lunch at a transport caff between visits to Daoists in Shuozhou, our wonderful and erudite driver Ma Hongqi wrote this elegant poem into my notebook, said to have been composed by Yingying on her first meeting with Scholar Zhang in the Romance of the Western Chamber:

which, as the young scholar soon discerned, is to be read first vertically, all the way down; then back upwards, turning left at 花; then all the way back to the right; and finally back to the left, turning upwards at 花—creating this four-line verse:

九月九花金顶头
头顶金花好风流
流风好花头上戴
戴上头花九月九

Variant versions of these can be found online.

[1] 到 to be substituted for the implied 倒:“an upturned 等 turned back upright”.