In brief
Two branches of the Jia clan live side by side in the capital, in the Ningguo and Rongguo mansions, with hundreds of relatives, concubines and servants. At the centre is Jia Baoyu, a boy born with a piece of jade in his mouth, adored by his grandmother, despaired of by his father, and happiest among the girls of the household. Two cousins come to live with them: Lin Daiyu, orphaned, gifted, sickly and quick to take offence, and Xue Baochai, calm, capable and approved of by every elder. The family builds a vast garden for an imperial visit and then lets the young people live in it. For a few years it is a paradise of poetry, flirtation and feasts. Then the money runs out, the scandals surface, and the paradise is searched, emptied and lost.
It is the most read and most argued-over novel in Chinese, long enough to hold a whole society and exact enough that readers have mapped the menus, medicines and rooms. It is also a Buddhist parable that tells you on its first page that everything you are about to love is an illusion.
The argument
The book is framed by a myth. When the goddess Nüwa repaired the sky she made 36,501 blocks of stone and used 36,500; the one left over, having gained a mind, grieves at being useless (ch. 1). A Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest carry it down into the world of men to experience wealth and love. In the same heavenly prologue a crimson pearl grass, once watered by an attendant spirit, vows that if he is born as a human she will follow him and repay him “with the tears of a whole lifetime”. Baoyu carries the stone into the world as the jade in his mouth, and Daiyu is the plant that weeps.
So the novel argues two things at once, and refuses to choose between them. The frame says that attachment is suffering and that the red dust of the world is a dream to wake from. The body of the book makes that world so vivid, funny and tender that the reader cannot wish it away. In a dream in the first chapter, Zhen Shiyin, who will be the first character to wake and walk away with the Taoist, sees the book’s motto on the arch of the Great Void: “When falsehood stands for truth, truth likewise becomes false” (ch. 1). The novel is about that blurring. Its two great families are named Zhen and Jia, puns on “true” and “false”, and the Jias are the ones we follow.
Underneath the Buddhism there is a sharper complaint. Baoyu hates the examination career his father demands, scorns officials as careerists, and holds, as his family reports with embarrassment, that “the bones and flesh of woman” are made of water “while those of man of mud” (ch. 2). The book sides with him far enough to make the young women of the garden its true subject: their talents, their lack of any outlet for them, and how few of them come to a good end.
The shape of the book
The novel has 120 chapters, each headed by a paired couplet. The first five are an overture. After the heavenly prologue, Daiyu travels to the Jia mansion and meets Baoyu, who announces, to everyone’s amusement, “This cousin I have already seen in days gone by” (ch. 3). Then in ch. 5 Baoyu dreams his way into the Land of Illusion, where a fairy shows him registers of the Twelve Beauties of Jinling, each with a riddling poem and picture, and has the songs of the Dream of the Red Chamber sung to him. The registers foretell the fate of every major heroine. He understands none of it. The reader is given the whole ending in code before the story has properly begun.
The first movement rises to a peak of display: the extravagant funeral of Qin Keqing (ch. 13), Baoyu’s sister Yuanchun raised to imperial consort (ch. 16), and the building of the Grand View Garden for her single night’s visit home (ch. 17–18). The long middle is life in the garden, told in episodes rather than plot: Baoyu and Daiyu reading a forbidden play together (ch. 23), Daiyu burying fallen petals and singing her lament (ch. 27), Baoyu beaten almost to death by his father (ch. 33), the girls founding a poetry club (ch. 37). From about chapter 70 the tone darkens: a suicide, a search of the garden for evidence of impropriety, maids dismissed, Qingwen dead. The last forty chapters bring the catastrophe: the deception by which Baoyu is married to Baochai while Daiyu dies, the confiscation of the family’s property, Baoyu’s sudden success in the examinations and his disappearance with the monk and the priest.
The voice
The narrator is a storyteller in the old oral manner, closing each chapter with an invitation to hear the next, and the book is full of verse: riddles, drinking games, elegies, the poems the girls write in competition. The verse is never ornament. Each girl writes in her own voice, so Daiyu’s melancholy and Baochai’s poise are shown in what they compose as much as in what they say. It is also what suffers most in translation; Joly apologised in his preface for his “doggerel and uncouth rhymes”.
The prose itself is the plainest and most exact of its age, close to spoken northern Chinese, and attentive to things: dishes, fabrics, medicines, the arrangement of rooms. Most of the drama happens in small gestures, a gift sent to one cousin and not another, a remark half overheard at a window. Cao rarely tells us what anyone feels. He lets two characters misread each other in the same scene and leaves us to see it.
Over all of it hangs the book’s account of itself. The opening chapter says that the author spent ten years revising it, five times over, and gives his verse: “Pages full of silly litter, / Tears a handful sour and bitter” (ch. 1, in H. Bencraft Joly’s rhyme). The self-mockery is a mask for grief, and readers have always taken it so.
The house
The Jia household is a model of a great Qing family, and Cao knew one from inside. Three generations of his family held the post of imperial textile commissioner at Nanjing. The family were bondservants of the imperial house, rich and close to the Kangxi emperor, who stayed with them on several of his southern tours. Under the next emperor, Yongzheng, they fell: in 1728 their property was confiscated for debts and irregularities. Cao grew up in the shadow of that loss and died poor outside Beijing. The novel’s imperial visit, the debts behind the display, the confiscation at the end all have the weight of things remembered.
The economics are as exact as Austen’s. Xifeng, who runs Rongguo, lends out the servants’ wages at interest. Tanchun, put in charge for a few months, finds the garden can pay its way if its bamboo, flowers and lotus are put in the care of the old serving women, who may sell what they grow (ch. 56). Granny Liu, a poor country widow who comes to beg, works out what a single crab feast costs and finds it would keep a farming family for a year. Hierarchy is exact too: maids can be sold, given away or driven to death, and one, Jinchuan, drowns herself after Lady Wang slaps and dismisses her for a moment’s flirtation that was Baoyu’s fault (ch. 32).
The people
Jia Baoyu
Not a hero in any usual sense. He is idle, emotional, sweet to everyone, especially to girls and maids, and helpless when anything goes wrong. What he has is sympathy, which the novel treats as a kind of genius and a kind of folly. His father’s beating is the collision between that sympathy and the Confucian order that wants an official out of him.
Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai
The two cousins are the novel’s great pairing, and readers have argued about them for two centuries. Daiyu is brilliant, frail, sharp-tongued and entirely sincere; she cannot pretend, and so she cannot protect herself. Baochai is kind, sensible and socially perfect, and wears a golden locket whose inscription matches the one on Baoyu’s jade (ch. 8). The family sees a match of gold and jade; the heavenly frame says Baoyu’s bond is with the weeping plant. The registers of chapter 5 give them a single shared picture and poem, which many readers take as a sign that the two are halves of one ideal.
Wang Xifeng
The most vivid character in the book: witty, ruthless, a brilliant manager, the only woman with real power apart from the grandmother. She sets a deadly trap for a cousin who desires her (ch. 12), runs a great funeral flawlessly, and later drives her husband’s secret concubine You Erjie to suicide (ch. 69). Her fall is the family’s fall in small.
Grandmother Jia, Jia Zheng and the rest
The grandmother rules by affection and indulges Baoyu against his father. Jia Zheng is honest, rigid and out of his depth. Around them stand dozens of distinct figures: Tanchun, the able daughter of a concubine, ashamed of her mother; Xiangyun, frank and merry; Miaoyu, the proud nun; and the maids, Xiren, loyal and careful, and Qingwen, beautiful and outspoken, who is dismissed on suspicion and dies of it.
Two authors
Cao Xueqin, who probably died around 1763, left about eighty chapters. They circulated in manuscript under the title The Story of the Stone, with marginal notes by a commentator who signed as Zhiyanzhai, “Red Inkstone”, and seems to have known the author and his family well. The notes refer to scenes in later chapters that are now lost. In 1791 Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E printed the first complete version in 120 chapters, saying they had pieced together the ending from fragments; a revised edition followed in 1792.
In 1921 Hu Shi argued that Gao E wrote the last forty chapters himself, and that the novel was largely autobiographical. Both claims shaped a century of scholarship. Opinion now is divided: many scholars think Gao and Cheng worked from real drafts and edited heavily; others still treat the ending as a forgery. Readers notice the change in any case. The last forty chapters are more plotted and more conventionally moral, and the Jia family’s fortunes are partly restored at the end, which the hints in Cao’s own chapters and Red Inkstone’s notes do not suggest. But the most famous scene in the whole novel, Daiyu burning her poems and dying while the wedding music plays across the garden (ch. 97–98), is in the continuation.
Readers and critics
The study of the novel has its own name, Redology (hongxue). Early readers hunted for the real people behind the characters; some read it as a political allegory against the Manchu dynasty. Lu Xun observed that every reader finds what he brings: the classicist sees the Book of Changes, the moralist sees lust, the revolutionary sees anti-Manchu feeling. Hu Shi’s textual approach made it a subject of modern scholarship. In 1954 Mao Zedong backed a campaign against the scholar Yu Pingbo for reading the novel too aesthetically rather than as a portrait of feudal decay, and the book became a matter of state.
In English it arrived late and in pieces. Joly’s translation, made in Macao and published in Hong Kong in 1892–93, stopped at chapter 56. Abridgements by Wang Chi-chen (1929) and by the McHughs (1958), from Franz Kuhn’s German of 1932, followed. The complete text came only with David Hawkes and John Minford’s five-volume The Story of the Stone (Penguin, 1973–86) and the Yangs’ A Dream of Red Mansions (1978–80). Hawkes’s version is generally counted one of the great translations of the century.
Afterlives
The novel has been staged in every Chinese opera form, filmed many times, and turned into two landmark television serials, CCTV’s 1987 version and Li Shaohong’s of 2010. The Yue opera film of 1962 made the aria of Daiyu burying the flowers famous. Bright Sheng’s English-language opera premiered in San Francisco in 2016. Sequels began appearing within a few years of the 1791 edition, most of them giving Daiyu the marriage she was denied. In China the names are household words: a girl called “a Lin Daiyu” is delicate and quick to cry.
How to read it
- Choose a full translation. Joly’s version, on Gutenberg, is literal, stiff and ends at chapter 56; it is useful, but Hawkes and Minford, or the Yangs, give the whole book in readable English.
- Keep a list of names. The cast runs to hundreds. Most editions print a family tree; use it.
- Read chapter 5 twice. Once at the start, without understanding it, and once at the end, when every riddle has come true.
- Do not hurry the garden. The middle chapters feel plotless because the point is the texture of the life that will be lost.
- Notice where chapter 80 ends. Read the continuation knowing it may not be Cao’s, and ask where it feels like him and where it does not.
Read next
- The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei, c. 1610). The earlier domestic novel Cao learned from, darker and far more explicit.
- Wang Shifu, The Story of the Western Wing. The love play Baoyu and Daiyu read in secret, and the pattern for the romance they cannot have.
- Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (c. 1010). Another vast portrait of a court world of poetry and love, also shadowed by Buddhist impermanence.
- Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913–27). The European novel closest in scale and in its aim: to recover a lost society by remembering it exactly.
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958). A great house in decline, seen with love and without illusions.