Dream of the Red Chamber

About Dream of the Red Chamber

Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1750s, published 1791) by Cao Xueqin is one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature and by many critical accounts the greatest novel ever written in Chinese. An encyclopedic portrait of an aristocratic Qing dynasty family's decline, it follows the love story of the sensitive Jia Baoyu and his cousin Lin Daiyu against a world of more than four hundred characters, elaborate garden life, poetry, ritual, and social obligation. Cao Xueqin wrote eighty chapters before his death; Gao E completed the final forty. The novel gave rise to an entire academic discipline in China — 'Redology' — and remains the most widely read and studied Chinese fiction of any era. The best English translation is David Hawkes and John Minford's five-volume Story of the Stone (Penguin Classics).