The poems in Dream of the Red Chamber are like water grass. Take them out of the water and they are nothing; leave them in the water and they are beautiful. When the Twelve Beauties were designed, that was the decision: not twelve portraits, but one atmosphere.
So the modelling gave up the individual. On its own, one figure is grass out of water. Together they become the water — the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the kind and the cruel, all present, which is what a world is.
Telling one's own story
The vessels and patterns each figure carries could have quoted the novel — Daiyu with her hoe, burying flowers. That would have been safe and it would have been borrowing. The opening quatrain of the book — 'pages of absurd words, a handful of bitter tears' — asks something else of a reader: to say what the book meant to you. The patterns say that.
Every set is fired as one. The loss rate is high; a single crack retires twelve figures. The atelier keeps to the method because what survives the kiln cannot be made twice.
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