Dream of the Red Chamber

Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng) is a long Chinese novel written in the eighteenth century, during the Qing dynasty. It tells the story of the Jia family, a wealthy and noble clan living in the capital, and especially of the teenage heir Jia Baoyu and the girls and young women around him. Many readers in China consider it the greatest Chinese novel ever written.

The title uses “red chamber” to mean the richly decorated rooms where the daughters of wealthy families lived. The “dream” points to the novel’s central idea: that the splendour of this world, its love and its wealth, may be as passing as a dream. The book was first known as The Story of the Stone (Shitouji), and the first chapter lists other titles it was given.

The novel is celebrated for its enormous cast—roughly forty major characters and hundreds of minor ones—and for the realism of its everyday details: food, clothes, medicine, festivals, poetry games, household accounts and the tensions between masters and servants. At the same time, it is framed by myth and filled with dreams, prophecies and symbols.

The novel opens in myth. When the goddess Nüwa repaired the sky, one stone was left unused. Made conscious by its time in the heavens, it begs a Buddhist monk and a Daoist priest to take it into the human world. In a parallel legend, a divine attendant waters a crimson flower in heaven; when both are born as humans, the flower-spirit will repay him with the tears of a lifetime. These become Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu.

Baoyu grows up in the Rongguo mansion, one of two linked households of the Jia clan in the capital (the other is the Ningguo mansion). He is doted on by his grandmother, the family matriarch, and feared by his stern father, who wants him to study the Confucian classics for the civil service examinations. Baoyu hates this path and prefers the company of girls, whom he calls pure, while men seem to him coarse. His orphaned cousin Lin Daiyu comes to live with the family; she is brilliant, proud and frail. Another cousin, Xue Baochai, is prudent, well-mannered and admired by the elders.

When Baoyu’s elder sister becomes an imperial consort, the family builds a vast garden, the Garden of Grand View, for her visit. Afterwards the young cousins move into it, and for a time it becomes an enclosed paradise of poetry clubs, flowers and friendship. Around them, the capable and ruthless Wang Xifeng manages the household, and the wider world breaks in through visitors such as Granny Liu, a poor country woman whose visits show the gulf between rich and poor.

Beneath the elegance, the family is rotting: extravagance, debts, corruption, sexual scandals and abuse of power. In the version most people read, Baoyu is tricked into marrying Baochai while Daiyu dies of illness and grief; the family’s property is confiscated by the emperor; and Baoyu, after passing the examinations, leaves the world to become a monk. The stone returns to where it came from.

The author, Cao Xueqin, came from a family that had known great wealth. His grandfather Cao Yin was a close confidant of the Kangxi Emperor and served as Commissioner of Imperial Textiles in Jiangning (modern Nanjing), a lucrative post the family held for three generations. The Caos were Han Chinese bondservants attached to the Manchu imperial household, registered in the Plain White Banner.

After the Yongzheng Emperor came to the throne, the family fell from favour. Around 1727–28 its property was confiscated and the family moved to Beijing. In his later years Cao lived in poverty in the western outskirts of the capital, where friends remembered him as a talented painter and poet and a heavy drinker. He died in 1763 or 1764, leaving the novel unfinished.

Scholars have long read the Jia family’s decline as drawing on the Cao family’s own history, but they caution against treating the novel as a disguised autobiography. The novel itself plays with this question: the names of two characters in the first chapter, Zhen Shiyin and Jia Yucun, are puns meaning roughly “true events hidden” and “false words remain.”

Grandmother Jia, the widowed matriarch of the Rongguo mansion, sits at the top of the household. Her authority is affectionate but absolute, and much of the family’s pleasure—feasts, theatricals, outings in the garden—revolves around her. Baoyu’s parents, the rigid Jia Zheng and the outwardly pious Lady Wang, represent Confucian duty and the anxious control of a mother over her son’s future.

Wang Xifeng, married to Baoyu’s cousin Jia Lian, is one of the most memorable figures in Chinese fiction. Witty, charming and a brilliant manager, she keeps the huge household running, but she also lends money at interest, takes bribes and destroys rivals. Her cleverness serves the family and harms it at the same time, a small image of the whole house.

The young women of the garden each have their own world. Besides Daiyu and Baochai, there are Baoyu’s sisters and cousins—Yuanchun the imperial consort, the capable Tanchun, the timid Yingchun, the aloof Xichun—and the lively Shi Xiangyun, who loves to drink and compose poems. Among the maids, the proud Qingwen and the loyal Xiren are drawn as fully as their mistresses, and the novel pays close attention to the injustice of their dependent lives.

The servants, stewards, actors, nuns, relatives and visitors form a society of their own, with gossip, rivalries and alliances. Through them the novel shows how power and money flow through a great household, and how the fate of the powerful drags down many who had no voice in its decisions.

At the gate of the dream-realm that Baoyu visits in chapter 5, the Land of Illusion (Taixu huanjing), hangs a couplet that sums up the book: when the false is taken for true, the true becomes false; where nothing is taken for something, something becomes nothing. The novel constantly blurs truth (zhen) and falsehood (jia)—even the family name Jia sounds like the word for “false.”

In that dream Baoyu reads registers foretelling the fates of the “Twelve Beauties of Jinling” in cryptic poems and hears songs about their sorrows. Most will meet unhappy ends. The episode gives the novel a tragic framework: the reader watches the young women flourish in the garden knowing that their youth and beauty will be lost. The Buddhist and Daoist ideas that frame the book—attachment brings suffering, worldly glory is empty—stand in tension with its intense affection for the people and pleasures it describes.

The novel is also a sharp portrait of Qing elite society. It shows how the examination system, family hierarchy, marriage politics and the dependence of servants shaped lives. Critics have especially praised its women characters, who are more varied and fully drawn than in earlier Chinese fiction, and its sympathy for maids and concubines whose lives were controlled by others.

Baoyu himself is an unusual hero: gentle, emotional, indifferent to official success and often absurd. Some readers see him as a critic of Confucian orthodoxy, others as a portrait of passion (qing) that must finally be transcended. The love triangle of Baoyu, Daiyu and Baochai has been read as a contrast between feeling and propriety, poetry and practicality.

Dream of the Red Chamber belongs to the Chinese tradition of the chapter novel (zhanghui xiaoshuo), in which each chapter has a paired-line title and often ends with a line inviting readers to find out what happens in the next chapter. It inherits devices from oral storytelling but uses them with great self-awareness.

Its language is a supple written vernacular close to the speech of Beijing, which helped establish Mandarin as a literary language. Characters speak in distinctive voices, from the polished talk of the matriarch to the earthy jokes of Granny Liu. The novel also contains a large number of poems, song lyrics, riddles and couplets, written for different characters in styles suited to their personalities; many of them secretly foreshadow those characters’ fates.

Cao Xueqin structured the book through contrasts and echoes: the two mansions, pairs of characters who mirror each other, festivals that mark the passing years, and the seasons of the garden from spring blossoms to autumn decay. Small objects—Baoyu’s jade, Baochai’s golden locket, a handkerchief, a fan—carry layers of meaning that later chapters bring back.

During Cao Xueqin’s lifetime and for decades after, the novel circulated only in handwritten copies, usually under the title The Story of the Stone and with at most eighty chapters. About a dozen early manuscripts survive. Many contain commentary in red ink, attributed mainly to a figure calling himself Zhiyanzhai (“Red Inkstone Studio”) and another called Jihu Sou; these copies are therefore called the “Rouge” or zhiben manuscripts.

The best-known manuscripts are named after the cyclical years that appear in them: the Jiaxu manuscript (1754), the Jimao (1759) and the Gengchen (1760). Scholars stress that the surviving copies are mostly later transcriptions and that these dates refer to rounds of copying and commentary, not necessarily to the physical copies themselves.

In 1791 Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E published the first printed edition, in 120 chapters, made with movable type; a revised edition followed in 1792. These are known as the Chengjia and Chengyi editions. Cheng’s preface said that he had gathered the missing chapters over years from various sources and that he and Gao E had edited them. The 120-chapter version became the one that most readers knew for over a century.

Modern scholarly editions usually base the first eighty chapters on the early manuscripts and add the last forty from the Cheng–Gao text, noting their different status.

Soon after it was printed, the novel became a sensation. Readers wrote sequels, poems and commentaries, painters illustrated its scenes, and a saying claimed that anyone who talks without mentioning the Red Chamber has read books in vain. Its characters became types: a sickly, sensitive young woman might be called a “Lin Daiyu.”

In the twentieth century the novel was made into operas, many films and television series; the 1987 Chinese television adaptation became a national event. Its stories are also well known in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. In Korea, a Korean-language manuscript translation of the full text was made in the late nineteenth century for the royal household, a sign of how widely the novel travelled in East Asia.

Complete English translations include A Dream of Red Mansions by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes and John Minford, who divided the work between them—Hawkes the first eighty chapters, Minford the last forty—mirroring the novel’s own textual history. The novel has also been translated into Korean, Japanese, Russian, German, French and many other languages.

The study of this single novel is so extensive that it has its own name, Redology (hongxue). Early twentieth-century interpreters of the “index” or “hidden meaning” school read the novel as a coded political allegory; Cai Yuanpei’s 1917 study, for example, interpreted it as expressing anti-Manchu feeling, with characters standing for historical figures.

In 1921 Hu Shi published his textual research on the novel, arguing on documentary grounds that Cao Xueqin was the author of the first eighty chapters, that the novel drew heavily on his family’s history, and that the last forty chapters were by Gao E. This “New Redology,” continued by Yu Pingbo and Zhou Ruchang, focused on authorship, manuscripts and biography.

Redology became political in 1954, when Mao Zedong backed criticism by two young scholars, Li Xifan and Lan Ling, of Yu Pingbo’s “bourgeois” approach. The campaign turned into a nationwide attack on Hu Shi’s influence. For decades afterward, official interpretation read the novel as an exposure of feudal society and class oppression. Since the 1980s scholarship has become more pluralistic, returning to textual questions, aesthetics, material culture and comparative studies.

The most famous problem in Redology is the ending. Hu Shi’s view that Gao E wrote the final forty chapters dominated much of the twentieth century and was reinforced by the observation that Zhiyanzhai’s comments seem to refer to events and plot turns that do not match the Cheng–Gao ending. Some scholars have tried to reconstruct Cao’s intended conclusion from these comments and from the prophetic poems of chapter 5.

Other evidence complicates this picture. A 120-chapter manuscript, sometimes linked to Gao E’s working drafts, survives, and its relationship to the printed text is debated. Many scholars now think it unlikely that Gao E simply invented the ending himself; they propose that he and Cheng Weiyuan edited materials that may include fragments of Cao’s drafts and continuations by unknown hands. Statistical studies of vocabulary and style have been used to argue that the two parts differ, but such methods have their own limitations.

Reading editions therefore reflect scholarly choices. Some modern Chinese editions present the last forty chapters with attributions such as “anonymous continuation, edited by Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E” rather than naming Gao E as author. The debate is not only about who wrote what; it concerns whether the novel’s meaning should be judged by the Cheng–Gao ending, with its reconciliation and Baoyu’s examination success, or by the harsher collapse that the early commentary seems to foreshadow.

Much of what is known about Cao Xueqin’s life comes from scattered evidence: poems by friends such as the Manchu brothers Dunmin and Duncheng, archival records about the Cao family’s textile posts and confiscation, and hints in the commentaries. Some supposed relics and documents that surfaced in the twentieth century have been disputed or judged forgeries, so claims about Cao’s biography need careful sourcing.

The identity of the commentators is also uncertain. Zhiyanzhai has been proposed as a relative of Cao—an uncle, a cousin, even a woman who appears in the novel—but no identification is universally accepted. The commentaries mention personal memories of events in the story, which supports the idea that the novel drew on family experience, but they cannot simply be taken as factual testimony.

Interpretation also raises questions of comparison. Readers outside China have compared the novel with Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, with Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji and with the family sagas of European realism. Such comparisons can illuminate its treatment of memory, society and desire, but specialists warn that the novel’s framework of Buddhist and Daoist thought, its intertextual play with Chinese poetry, and its roots in the chapter-novel tradition should be understood on their own terms.