Lantern Poems and Riddle Clubs

I’ve been reading The Adventures of Wu by H. Y. Lowe (盧興源), a fascinating narrative journey through traditional life in Old Beijing, and I found the following explanation of lantern riddles (燈謎, pg. I.98).

Making and solving riddles or conundrums is a highly developed literary pursuit in China and is the universal hobby of all learned scholars. They are known as teng mi (燈迷), or “lantern riddles,” on account of the fact that originally they were written on strips of paper and hung up on a paper lantern for the public to solve—a very interesting out-door pastime for talented “men of letters.” The lanterns were necessary as the meetings were almost always nocturnal. The riddle clubs’ meetings are still observable in Peking’s side streets and quiet lanes during hot summer evenings. Very often they compose riddles by quotations from famous poems as the question, called mien (面) or “face,” and using the sub-title in a Chinese story-book, or a sentence from the classics, or a popular proverb, or the name of a famous play or an actor, as the answer, called li (裡) or “lining.” They are very difficult for a beginner, and provide more fun and brain-twisting than a combination of the foreign conundrums mixed with the hardest of cross-word puzzles.

 It seems there may have been at a few Manchu literati who composed lantern riddles for each other, and some of these were included in the Staatsbibliothek poems. Here is one whose title is Old Person Lantern.

	sakda niyalma dengjan [老人燈],		Old Person Lantern
	Staatsbibliothek 14.27 (View Online)
	sakda durun,		The shape of the old person:
	fisa kumcuhun,		Bent of back,
	niyengse arbun,		thin of form,
	adu nekeliyen,		clothing meager,
5	duha wenjehun,		guts warm,
	yasa getuken,		eyes clear,
	kalcun sain,		spirit good,
	mujakū huwekiyen,		truly happy.
	aide teifun,		Where is the staff?
10	umesi katun,		Very strong!
	juse dasu-i feniyen,		A flock of children.
	niorokoi efin,		A game of bewitching,
	seinggei simen,		the vitality of the aged one,
	naranggi eden,		after all is lacking,
15	gereke de kapahūn.		when dawn comes, small in stature.

On the face of it, this is a poem about an elderly person, but since it’s a riddle the answer must be something else.