A new reading of an early medieval riddle: "Utterly wonderful, lovely words"?

In the history of Chinese literary riddles, one work marks an aesthetic milestone and yet still causes uncertainty with regard to its context, syntactical structure, and meaning. Composed sometime between the mid-second to early fourth centuries in southeastern China, this riddle is a "postscript" to a stele inscription that relates how a fourteen-year-old Maiden Cao (d. 143) sacrificed her life by jumping into a river to search for the body of her drowned father. The "question" and "answer" of the riddle have been deciphered and construed in early sources, but are only treated there as a self-descriptive comment, without a larger context. After a brief survey of different kinds of riddle texts, this essay applies current theories about riddle composition to the text in question, also making use of relevant but overlooked historical and geographical information. A new reading of the riddle is ventured, in which it is seen to epitomize in enigmatically refined language the tragic act of Ms. Cao.