mika–82 is absolutely correct in all respects but I would like to chip in and unpack “good-looking” juuuust a bit
Song Lan says doesn’t just say 相貌不錯 xiangmaobucuo / he’s not bad-looking (concise, but ambivalent) or 他長得很好看 tazhangdehenhaokan / he’s very good-looking (colloquial, but perhaps too pedestrian?). Nope, he goes for a full-on 相貌甚佳 xiangmaoshenjia (literary and extreme).
相貌 xiangmao means ‘appearance’ or ‘features’ ‘or countenance’
甚 shen is more than ‘very’ – definitely an ‘extremely’ at the very least. It’s worth noting that all the words/phrases 甚 shen is a part of focus on extremity. Off the top of my head, 甚至 shenzhi means ‘even so’ in the sense of 他甚至這個都做了！/ he even did THAT! 食甚 shishen refers to the moment of totality in an eclipse. I can keep going if requested; there’s a biblical translation that’s surfacing in my brain but we don’t need that right now
佳 jia is a whole-ass mood, and by mood I mean like, literary thing. First of all, it’s the highly literary version of your regular, run-of-the-mill 好 hao / ‘good.’ Like 甚 shen, it carries connotations of the superlative and extreme. But most importantly, it’s half of a very well-known binome, 佳人 jiaren. Literally translated, 佳人 jiaren means “excellent person.” Specifically, it’s used to refer to beautiful women.
How beautiful? Well, Helen of Troy would certainly be considered a 佳人 jiaren， let’s put it that way.
This is getting a lil excessive for one character, but one poem and translation and then I’m done, I promise
There’s this famous Han Dynasty poem by 李延年 Li Yan Nian:
北方有佳人，/ In the north there is a beautiful person,
绝世而独立。/ who stands alone, peerless in this world.
一顾倾人城，/ One look will topple human cities
再顾倾人国。/ Another look will topple human kingdoms
宁不知倾城与倾国？/ How could you not know of the toppling of cities, the toppling of kingdoms?
佳人难再得。/ Such a beautiful person will be hard to find again.
(side note: this poem featured in Zhang Yimou’s 2004 wuxia film, 十面埋伏 House of Flying Daggers, in which the absolutely legendary 章子怡 Zhang Ziyi sings this poem and dances to it. Incidentally, she’s also playing a seeing character pretending to be blind)
From this poem, you get the Chinese idiom 傾國傾城 qingguoqingcheng, which literally means “to topple kingdoms and cities,” which refers to a specific kind of beauty that has literally (okay maybe only partially) led to the fall of dynasties. I’m not even kidding. There’s literally a commonly-known group called the 四大美女 sidameinv / the Four Great Beauties who are all famously beautiful women in Chinese history (or historical literature) who were – for better or for worse – attributed with overthrowing dynasties and changing the outcome of wars because they were too good-looking.
(except 王昭君 Wang Zhaojun. Everyone in her story has too much good sense for a kingdom to be lost, but she does cement an alliance)
BUT BACK TO SONGXIAO what I’m trying to say is that Song Lan didn’t just say that Xiao Xingchen was “nice-looking,” he basically said that Xiao Xingchen was smokin’ hot except like, in two characters and blanketed with literary respectability.
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