A DREAM OF Red Mansions (Honglou meng) is the greatest novel in the Chinese literary tradition. As an eighteenth-century work, it draws fully upon that tradition and can indeed be regarded as its crowning achievement. As that tradition is early distinguished by its poetry and philosophy, we expectedly find in Dream numerous poems in a variety of meters, including an elegy in the style of Chuzi (Songs of the South, an ancient anthology), along with philosophic conversations that echo the sages of antiquity (Laozi, Zhuangzi, Mencius) and utilize the subtle language of Zen Buddhism. As a late-traditional man of letters, its principal author is further aware of the encyclopedic scope of Chinese learning and the heritage of earlier fiction and drama. He has made obvious use of the Ming domestic novel Jinping mei and the romantic masterpieces of Yuan-Ming drama such as The Romance of the Western Chamber (Xi-xiang ji) and The Peony Pavilion (Mu-dan ting). But his novel is greater than these not only for its fuller representation of Chinese culture and thought but for its incomparably richer delineation of character in psychological terms. That latter achievement must be solely credited to the genius of its principal author.
That author is Cao Xüeqin (1715?–1763), an ethnic Chinese from a family that had served the Manchu emperors of the Qing dynasty for generations. Though mere bondservants to the throne in status, Cao’s great-grandfather, grandfather, and father or uncle all held the highly lucrative post of commissioner of imperial textile mills, first briefly in Soochow and then in Nanking. The grandfather Cao Yin played host to the Kangxi emperor during his four southern excursions from Peking. The Yungzheng emperor, who succeeded Kangxi in 1723, was far less friendly to the Cao house. In 1728 he dismissed Cao Fu, most probably Xüeqin’s father, from his post as textile commissioner of Nanking and confiscated much of his property. Then thirteen or fourteen years old, Xüeqin moved with his parents to Peking, in much reduced circumstances. It is believed that the Cao clan temporarily regained favor after the Qianlong emperor ascended the throne in 1736. But by 1744, when Xüeqin started composing his novel, he had moved to the western suburbs of Peking, again living in poverty: the Cao family must have suffered another disaster, from which it never recovered. The novelist lost a young son a few months before his death in February 1763 and was survived by a second wife, of whom we know nothing further.
By all indications, Cao Xüeqin should have had ample time to complete Dream to his own satisfaction, but it would seem that at the time of his death this novel of autobiographical inspiration—about a great family in decline and its young heir—was not yet in publishable shape, even though manuscripts of the first eighty chapters, known by title as The Story of the Stone, had been in circulation for some time. Scholars now believe that Cao must have completed at least one draft of the whole novel but went on revising it, partly to please the commentators among his kinsmen, most prominently a cousin known by his studio name of Red Inkstone (Zhihyan chai) and partly to remove any grounds for suspicion that his work was critical of the government in devoting space to the tribulations of a family justly deserving of imperial punishment. If Cao had indeed completed the last portion of the novel but did not allow it to circulate, it could have been due to fear of a literary inquisition.
A corrected second edition of the 120-chapter Dream of Red Mansions came out in 1792, only a few months after the first edition of 1791. The new edition contains, in addition to the original preface by Cheng Weiyüan, a new preface by Gao Ê and a joint foreword by the two. Earlier scholars arbitrarily took Cheng to be a bookseller who had acquired manuscripts of the later chapters and had asked the scholar Gao Ê to put them into shape and edit the work as a whole. Some would even regard Gao Ê as a forger. Now we know that Cheng Wei-yüan was a staffmember of the gigantic imperial project to assemble a “Complete Library in Four Branches of Learning and Literature” (Ssu-k’u ch’üan-shu). Ho-shen, a Manchu minister enjoying the complete trust of the Qianlong emperor, was made a director general of the project, and according to a new theory advanced by Zhou Ru-chang, a leading authority on the novel, it was Ho-shen himself who had ordered Cheng and Gao to prepare a politically harmless version for the perusal of the emperor. This theory should be taken seriously, inasmuch as Cheng and Gao could not have dreamed of putting out a movable-type edition of a massive novel without the backing of a powerful minister like Ho-shen and without the printing facilities of the imperial court.
Whatever its faults, the Cheng-Gao edition has remained the standard text for Chinese readers for two hundred years. Scholars, of course, will continue to regret that Cao Xüeqin did not live long enough to complete or oversee the publication of his own novel and belittle or give grudging praise to Gao Ê’s contributions as an editor and continuator of the first eighty chapters. But if the last forty chapters are not what they should be, the first eighty are also by no means a coherent narrative of seamless unity. In addition to minor inconsistencies in the storyline, Cao’s inveterate habit for revision would seem to be responsible for more serious instances of narrative ineptitude as well. One plausible theory (endorsed by David Hawkes) proposes that even before starting on his great project, Cao Xüeqin had acquired or himself written a manuscript called
A Mirror for the Romantic (
Feng-yüe bao-chian), about unhappy youths and maidens belatedly awakened to the illusory nature of love. He was apparently very fond of this manuscript and inserted some of its cautionary tales into his novel. He did so, of course, at the cost of upsetting its temporal scheme, since the autobiographical hero and his female cousins lead quite unhurried lives, while the trials of the deluded Jia Rui in
chapter 12 and of the hapless Yu sisters in chapters 64 through 67 consume weeks in a matter of pages. Try as he might, Cao could not have got himself out of this narrative impasse if he was determined to save these somewhat extraneous tales.
The story of the novel’s composition and publication thus remains a very complicated affair, one demanding further research by specialists. The novel itself, however, should pose few difficulties for the Western reader, unless he is intimidated right away by its sheer size. But the undaunted reader will be amply rewarded and will cherish the experience of having spent days and weeks with many memorable characters in a Chinese setting. A Dream of Red Mansions is about the aristocratic Jia clan, which, like the Cao family, has enjoyed imperial favor for generations. Its two main branches dwell in adjoining compounds, styled Ningguofu and Rongguofu, in the capital. The nominal head of the Ningguofu compound is a selfish student of Daoist alchemy who eventually dies its victim; his son Jia Zhen and grandson Chia Yong are both sensualists. Grandmother Jia, also known as the Lady Dowager in the Yang translation, presides over the Rongguofu compound. She has two sons, Jia She and Jia Zheng. Jia Lien, Jia She’s pleasure-seeking son, is married to an extremely capable woman, Wang Xi-feng (Phoenix). Despite her early triumphs in managing the household finances and driving her love rivals to suicide, this handsome and vivacious lady eventually languishes in ill health and dies. Her nefarious dealings are in large part responsible for the raiding of the Jia compounds by imperial guards and the confiscation of their property.
The dowager’s other son, Jia Zheng, is the only conscientious Confucian member of the family in active government service. A lonely man of narrow vision but undeniable rectitude, he has lost a promising son before the novel opens. Naturally, he expects his younger son by his legitimate wife, Lady Wang, to study hard and prepare for the civil-service examinations. But Baoyü, early spoiled by his grandmother, mother, and other female relatives, detests conventional learning and prefers the company of his female cousins and the maidservants. Since late childhood, he has had as a playmate a cousin of delicate beauty beloved by the dowager, Lin Dai-yü (Black Jade). Some years later, another beautiful cousin, Xüe Bao-chai (Precious Clasp), also moves into the Rungguofu compound. In spite of Baoyü’s repeated assurances of his love, Black Jade regards Precious Clasp as her rival and feels very insecure. As she progressively ruins her health by wallowing in self-pity, Precious Clasp replaces her as the family’s preferred candidate for Baoyü’s wife. But the marriage when it does take place brings no joy to Bao-chai, since by that time Baoyü has turned into an idiot. And brokenhearted and unable to forgive, Black Jade dies on their wedding night.
Baoyü eventually recovers and obtains the degree of juren. But instead of returning home after taking the examination, he renounces the world and becomes a monk. The desolate Precious Clasp takes comfort in her pregnancy. A faithful maid, Xi-ren (called Aroma in Hawkes and Minford) is eventually happily married to an actor friend of Baoyü’s. Another maid, Qing-wen (Skybright in Hawkes and Minford), to whom Baoyü was also much attached, had died of calumny and sickness long before his marriage.
Chinese novels before Dream are mostly about characters in history and legend. Though a type of short novel about talented and good-looking young lovers had become popular before his time, Cao Xüeqin quite properly dismisses these stereotyped romances in his novel for their palpable unreality. But his use of what we may call diurnal realism, the technique of advancing the novel with seemingly inconsequential accounts of day-to-day events and of lingering over days of family significance, clearly shows his indebtedness to the aforementioned Jin ping mei, the only one of the four major Ming novels devoted to tracing the fortunes of a discordant large family. (The other three, all available in English translation, are: Romance of the Three Kingdoms [San-guo-zhih-yan-i], Outlaws of the Marsh [Shui-hu zhuan], and Journey to the West [Xi yu ji].) But whereas Jin ping mei is notorious for its graphic descriptions of Xi-men Qing’s sexual life with his concubines and paramours, Dream is never pornographic, despite its larger cast of male sensualists. The novel maintains instead a note of high culture by focusing attention on the hero and on several gifted young ladies whose poetic parties and conversations with him invariably touch upon intellectual and aesthetic matters. The life story of Jia Baoyü, especially, is tested against all the major ideals of Chinese culture.
At the very beginning of the first chapter, Cao places his hero in a creation myth that mocks his Faustian desire for experience, knowledge, and pleasure. When the goddess Nü-gua is repairing the Dome of Heaven, she rejects as unfit for use a huge boulder of considerable intelligence, which consequently bemoans its fate and develops a longing for the pleasures of the mundane world. It can now shrink itself into the size of a stone and, with the help of a Buddhist monk and a Daoist priest, it is eventually born with a piece of jade in his mouth as our hero (Baoyü means “precious jade”). As a supramundane allegory, then, Dream is the transcription of a record as inscribed on the Stone itself after it has returned to its original site in the Green Fable Mountains. The Stone found human life wanting, its pleasures and pains all illusory, and its detailed record—our novel—is by allegorical design a massive substantiation of that truth. Throughout the novel, the celestial agents of that allegory, the mangy Buddhist and lame Daoist, while watching over the spiritual welfare of Baoyü, periodically mock or enlighten other deluded earthlings as well.
Jia Baoyü is next characterized in
chapter 2 by two knowledgeable outsiders as an unconventional individualist of the romantic tradition firmly opposed to the Confucian ideal of morality and service, as represented by his father. To illustrate his propensity for love, our hero, while taking a nap in the bedchamber of Qin Ko-qing (Jia Jong’s wife) in
chapter 5, is transported to the Land of Illusion, which is presided over by the fairy Disenchantment. After warning him of the dangers of the kind of crazy love prized by the romantics, she introduces her own sister to him for the purpose of sexual initiation, so that he may see through the vanity of passion and return to the path of Confucian service. The fairy Ke-qing, who combines in her person the charms of both Black Jade and Precious Clasp, of course enraptures Baoyü, but he soon wakes up screaming after being chased by demons and wild beasts.
When lecturing Baoyü, the fairy Disenchantment does allow a distinction between lust (yin) and love (qing), and as someone truly committed to qing (also meaning “feeling”), our hero is in no danger of being confused with several of his kinsmen who are often driven by lust to trample upon human feelings. But Baoyü is so free of the taint of lust that the dream allegory confuses matters by presenting him as someone desperate for salvation after only a brief interlude of sexual bliss. Contrary to popular belief among Chinese readers, Baoyü is not a great lover, nor does he function principally as a lover in the novel. It is true that remembrance of the sweeter portion of the dream leads him to make love to the maid Aroma the same evening. For all we know, they may continue to share sexual intimacy thereafter, but his enjoyment of her body, explicitly referred to only once and rarely emphasized again, alters not a whit his high regard for her as a person and a friend. Baoyü is actually more drawn to his other maid, Skybright, because of her entrancing beauty and fiery temperament, but she dies complaining of being a virgin, untouched by her young master.
Baoyü is every girl’s true friend. Once the Daguanyüan, a spacious garden built in honor of his elder sister, an imperial concubine, becomes the residential quarters of Baoyü and his female cousins, he sees them and their maids all the time and gives daily proof of his unfeigned friendship and solicitude for their welfare. He admires each and every one of these girls as an embodiment of celestial beauty and understanding but worries about the time when they will leave the garden to get married. He knows only too well that with marriage their celestial essence will be obscured and that, if they survive their unhappiness, they will become as mean spirited as the older women in the Jia mansions.
As the sole young master in the Daguanyüan, Baoyü therefore does his best to keep the young ladies and maids amused and to lull their awareness of the misery of approaching adulthood. But for all their lively parties and conversations, the young ladies have to leave one by one, by marriage, death, or abduction (in the case of the resident nun Miao-yu). It is these tragedies that reduce our helpless hero to a state of idiocy and prepare him for his eventual acceptance of his fate as an insensible Stone heedless of suffering humanity. In that allegorical dream, the fairy Disenchantment warns him only of his romantic propensity. But though he is grievously hurt when his elders rob him of his intended bride and marry him to Precious Clasp, ordinarily he is much more occupied by the tragic fate of Black Jade and of all the other girls deprived of life or happiness. In accordance with the author’s allegoric scheme, we should perhaps feel happy that he has finally gained wisdom and leaves this world of suffering for the life of a monk. But we cannot help feeling that his spiritual wisdom is gained at the expense of his most endearing trait: his active love and compassion for fellow human beings. Despite his irrepressible charm and gaiety, Jia Baoyü must be regarded as the most tragic hero in all Chinese literature for ultimately choosing the path of self-liberation because his sympathy and compassion have failed him.
Baoyü has a few like-minded male friends whom he sees occasionally, but inside the Jia mansions there are no men to whom he can unburden his soul. Even if he is not partial to girls, he has only them to turn to for genuine companionship. And it is a tribute to Cao’s extraordinary genius that he is able to provide Baoyü with so many sharply individualized companions to talk and joke with, to compete with as poets, and to care for and love. Among these, Black Jade naturally takes pride of place as the principal heroine, with whose fate Baoyü is most concerned. Alone of the major heroines, she is assigned a role in the supramundane allegory complementary to the hero’s. She is supposed to be a plant that blossoms into a fairy after the Stone, then serving as a page at the court of Disenchantment, has daily sprinkled it with dew. The fairy has vowed to repay his kindness with tears if she may join him on earth, and judging by the occasions that Black Jade has to cry while living as an orphan among relatives, never sure of her status in the Rongguofu nor of her marital future, she has certainly more than repaid her debt to her former benefactor.
Yet as is the case with Baoyü’s allegoric dream, Cao Xüeqin almost deliberately misleads with his fairy tale about Black Jade as a grateful plant. The reality of the two cousins in love is far more complex and fascinating than any allegory can suggest. Long before Black Jade is in danger of being rejected by her elders, she seethes with discontent. Her every meeting with Baoyü ends in a misunderstanding or quarrel, and these quarrels are, for her, fraught with bitter and lacerated feelings. This is so because the two are diametrically opposed in temperament despite the similarity of their tastes. Baoyü is a person of active sympathy capable of ultimate self-transcendence; Black Jade is a self-centered neurotic who courts self-destruction. Her attraction for Baoyü lies not merely in her fragile beauty and poetic sensibility but in her very contrariness—a jealous self-obsession so unlike his expansive gaiety that his love for her is always tinged with infinite sadness.
Black Jade, on her part, can never be sure of Baoyü’s love yet maintains a fierce pride in her studied indifference to her marital prospects. One could almost say that her tragedy lies in her stubborn impracticality, in the perverse contradiction between her very natural desire to get married to the man of her choice and her fear of compromising herself in the eyes of the world by doing anything to bring about that result. In time her temper gets worse, and so does her health. Cao Xüeqin never flinches from physiological details as he traces her growing emotional sickness in terms of her bodily deterioration. Her dream scene in chapter 82, where Baoyü slashes open his chest in order to show her his heart but finds it missing, and her ghastly death scene in chapter 98 are among the most powerful in the novel. Gao Ê must be given high praise if he indeed had a substantial hand in the writing of these chapters.
Because Precious Clasp nominally gets her man, Chinese readers partial to Black Jade are less sympathetic toward her and find personal satisfaction in seeing her as a hypocritical schemer. This misreading is, of course, unwarranted. It is true that, as a sensible girl docilely accepting her place in a Confucian society, Precious Clasp may have less appeal for Baoyü and for the modern reader than Black Jade, with her neurotic sensibility and volatile temper. Yet both are strictly comparable in talent and beauty, and both are fatherless children living more or less as dependents among relatives. Though Black Jade is initially jealous, she and Precious Clasp become the best of friends after chapter 45: two helpless pawns in the hands of their elders with no control over their marital fate. If the elders prefer Precious Clasp as Baoyü’s bride, at the same time they show little regard for her welfare. Though Baoyü was once a desirable match, by the time the wedding is proposed he is a very sick person with no immediate prospect for recovery. Even more than Black Jade, Precious Clasp is the victim of a cruel hoax, since there can be no doubt that the hastily arranged wedding is regarded by the elder Jia ladies as medicine for Baoyü. Madame Xüe cannot well refuse the match, but she feels profoundly sorry for her daughter. Precious Clasp herself, to whom her mother’s word is law, “bowed her head and didn’t say anything in reply; later on, she let her tears fall.” With due allowance for all the evil perpetrated by the matriarch, Madame Wang, and Phoenix, Black Jade has finally only herself to blame for ruining her health and alienating their affections in the first place; for Precious Clasp’s martyrdom, their brutal and desperate self-interest is alone responsible.
As the wife of Baoyü, Precious Clasp remains to the end a Confucian trying to dissuade him from the path of “self-liberation.” She is in that respect not unlike his parents in wishing to see him enter government service and get settled as a family man. But in the end she uses the Mencian argument to counter his Daoist resolve to leave the world. Even if the world is full of evil and suffering, or especially because it is so, how can he bear to sever human ties, to leave those who need his love most? How can one remain human by denying the most instinctive promptings of his heart? Precious Clasp cannot figure this out, and Baoyü cannot answer her on the rational level of human discourse. It is only by placing human life in the cosmological scheme of craving and suffering that one can see the need to liberate oneself. It would be too cruel even for the enlightened Baoyü to tell Precious Clasp that to cling to love and compassion is to persist in delusion: in the primordial antiquity of Daoism there was no need to love or commiserate.
With the exception of a discerning few, traditional and modern commentators alike have compared Precious Clasp unfavorably with Black Jade. In earlier Communist criticism, with the important exception of one critic, Precious Clasp has even been more grossly vilified: in marked contrast to the “revolutionary martyr” Black Jade, she is made out to be a cunning and hypocritical schemer thriving under feudalism. This curiously subjective reaction, as has been earlier suggested, is partly due to an instinctive preference for sensibility over sense. Precious Clasp is a virtuous and obedient girl and, as mentioned above, since she nominally gets her man, it is understandable that her goodness should be counted against her. But when one examines all the passages adduced to prove her cunning and hypocrisy, one finds that every single one of them is based on deliberate misreading. Precious Clasp, of course, is not a rebel: she accepts the role of woman in a Confucian society and believes that it is a scholar’s duty to prove his usefulness through the examinations and in the official world. In that sense, Black Jade, who shares Baoyü’s scorn for the “eight-legged essay” and for officialdom, is much less “vulgar” and certainly to be preferred. But whereas Black Jade’s detestation of vulgarity only hardens her egocentricism, Precious Clasp’s acceptance of Confucian morality implies a deliberate suppression of her poetic sensibility. If Precious Clasp can turn to her mother for love and solace, one must remember that she lives in a house of discord dominated by her moronic and wildly irresponsible brother. With her precocity and complicated life at home, she must display the patience and humility of a saint to mold herself into the accepted pattern of virtue. A poet and encyclopedic scholar busying herself with needlework, a peacemaker and loyal friend enduring enmity at home and envy abroad, she is finally the perfect wife, but she is sacrificed at the will of the Matriarch to serve a dying idiot.
Once married to Baoyü, Precious Clasp of course does her level best to change her intolerable situation: to restore her husband to health and to the world of human sentiments. Given his strange indifference in his reawakened state, however, she is willing to forgo comfort, wealth, and rank to renounce conjugal love. What she wants (and what Pervading Fragrance also wants) from Baoyü is consideration and kindness. Her final shock is that the person whose sensitiveness to suffering has always been his most endearing trait now does not care. In reacquiring his spiritual essence, Baoyü has turned into a stone.
At this point in the narrative we are introduced to a crucial philosophical debate that presents explicitly the irreconcilable claims of compassion and personal salvation. Earlier in chapter 118, Baoyü’s calm admiration for the decision of Compassion Spring and Purple Cuckoo to become nuns has already deeply tormented Precious Clasp and Pervading Fragrance, who would normally expect him to make a tearful commotion over their renunciation of the world. As Cao relates it:
After seeing Madame Wang off, Baoyü began to study “Autumn Floods” [a chapter in Zhuangzi] with minute attention. Emerging from the inner chamber, Precious Clasp noticed his exultant absentmindedness; she walked toward him to see what he was reading, and then her heart became very heavy. She thought, “He persists in regarding ‘escape from the world and detachment from humanity’ as his only concern; this is not good.” Knowing it would be impossible to dissuade him in his present rapt state, she sat down beside him, watching him intently. Finally noticing her presence, Baoyü asked, “What are you staring for?” Precious Clasp replied, “It just occurred to me that since we are man and wife you are my lifelong support, even though I agree this relationship is not necessarily built upon our selfish feelings and desires. As for glory and wealth, they are but like fleeting smoke and cloud. But I am thinking that since the time of the ancient sages it has always been stressed that one should cultivate his ‘moral character.’”
Baoyü didn’t have the patience to listen to the end; he put aside his book and said with a smile, “Just now you mentioned ‘moral character’ and ‘ancient sages,’ not knowing that what the ancient sages have stressed is the importance of ‘not losing the heart of a newborn baby.’ What’s so precious about the newborn baby except that he has no perception, no knowledge, no greed, and no envy? Once we are born, we all sink deeper and deeper in the mire of greed, hate, and passion; how can we ever escape from the net of red dust? I have just now realized that the ancient saying, ‘Whether we are together or apart, what we enjoy is but a floating life,’ has awakened few. As for one’s moral character, who has ever reached the condition of living in the state of primordial antiquity?”
Precious Clasp answered, “Since you mentioned ‘the heart of a newborn baby,’ you must know that the ancient sages regard loyalty and filial piety as characteristic of the heart of the newborn baby and not escape from the world and detachment from humanity. Yao, Shun, Yü, Tang, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius all ceaselessly set their hearts on helping the people and benefiting the world, and the so-called newborn baby’s heart finally amounts to ‘not being able to bear the pain or suffering about one.’ Just now you spoke of being able to bear the pain of forsaking the basic human relationships—what kind of absurdity is this?” Baoyü nodded his head and smiled. “Yao and Shun did not force their way of life upon Chao Fu and Xü Yu, nor did King Wen and the Duke of Zhou force theirs upon Bo-yi and Shuqi …” Not waiting for him to finish, Precious Clasp retorted, “Your words are getting more and more absurd. If the ancients were all like Chao Fu, Xü Yu, Bo-yi, and Shu-qi, how come people today still revere Yao, Shun, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius as sages? Moreover, it’s even more ridiculous to compare yourself to Bo-yi and Shu-qi. Victims of the declining fortunes of the Shang, they faced many difficulties and so they thought up some excuse for leaving the world. Now, under the present beneficent reign, our family has for generations enjoyed imperial favor, living in splendid style and luxury. Not to say that all your life your late grandmother, your father and mother have all cherished you like a precious jewel. Just think, is it right for you to maintain all that you just said?” Baoyü took all this in but made no reply; he only tilted his head and smiled.
This debate is the perennial debate in Chinese thought. Both Mencius and Laozi invoke the newborn baby as the norm of human excellence. But whereas for Laozi the baby is desireless and witless, for Mencius the baby is precious because he contains within himself all the virtues of Yao and Shun. To Mencius, love and sympathy are the basic facts of human life; so they are to Precious Clasp, and so they are to Baoyü until his “awakening.” If not being able to bear the sight of pain (bu-ren is a Mencian phrase) is not the test of one’s humanity, what is? How can one remain human by denying the most instinctive promptings of his heart? Precious Clasp cannot figure this out, and Baoyü cannot answer her on the rational level of human discourse. It is only by placing human life in the cosmological scheme of craving and suffering that one can conceive of the need to liberate oneself. It would be too cruel even for the enlightened Baoyü to tell Precious Clasp that to cling to love and compassion is to persist in delusion: in the primordial antiquity of Daoism there was no need to love or commiserate.
As a tragedy, A Dream of Red Mansions has the overtones of a bitter and sardonic comedy. The Buddhist-Daoist view of the world prevails with Baoyü in the end, yet the reader cannot but feel that the reality of love and suffering as depicted in the novel stirs far deeper layers of one’s being than the reality of Buddhist-Daoist wisdom. This Chinese masterpiece is therefore like all the greatest novels of the world in that no philosophic or religious message one extracts therefrom can at all do justice to its unfolding panorama of wondrous but perverse humanity. For any reader who would like a panoramic view of traditional Chinese life through the portrayal of many unforgettable characters in an authentic social and cultural setting, there can be no richer and more fascinating work than Cao Xüeqin’s A Dream of Red Mansions.
Note
The novel Hongloumeng is customarily known in English as The Dream of the Red Chamber (with or without the definite article) because earlier partial translations bear this rather enigmatic title. Today, however, its continuing use is unjustified, since we have a complete translation in three volumes by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978–1980) under the apt title A Dream of Red Mansions. Another complete translation in five volumes by David Hawkes and John Minford is called The Story of the Stone (New York: Penguin Books, 1973–1986), which accurately renders the novel’s alternative title Shitouji. However, since the work is best known in Chinese as Hongloumeng, A Dream of Red Mansions should be its preferred title in English—even though the Hawkes-Minford version is richer in style and more interesting to read.