In chapter 14 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Wang Xifeng takes over the running of the Ning household. The chief steward warns the servants that she is “famously fierce, sour-faced and hard-hearted.” When one servant comes late, she says that if she is lenient the first time, the others will be hard to manage. She orders him taken out and given twenty strokes with a board, and stops his month’s pay and rice.
He is beaten and must come back in to thank her. Before the assembled servants she adds: “Tomorrow, whoever is late gets forty. The day after, sixty.”