Dream of the Red Chamber Reading Order

Dream of the Red Chamber (Hóng Lóu Mèng, c. 1754–91) by Cao Xueqin is generally regarded as the greatest Chinese novel — a work of such scope, psychological depth, and formal innovation that it spawned its own academic discipline (Redology, the study of the novel and its textual history). The novel follows the decline of the Jia clan, one of four great aristocratic families in Beijing, through the stories of their household members: above all Jia Baoyu, a sensitive, poetic boy who loves the company of women and is destined for orthodox Confucian success but temperamentally unfit for it; his two cousins Lin Daiyu, the frail, brilliant poet he loves; and Xue Baochai, the healthy, practical girl his family wants him to marry. The novel's love triangle — Baoyu between Daiyu and Baochai — is the formal center around which hundreds of subsidiary characters and plots are arranged. Cao Xueqin left the novel unfinished at his death (the original manuscript survives through eighty chapters; a further forty were added by another hand, Gao E, from manuscript fragments); the authentic portion alone is one of the longest and most complex novels in any language. The novel is autobiographical in origin — Cao Xueqin's own family was one of the four great Bannermen families that declined in the eighteenth century — but transforms autobiography into a philosophical and aesthetic vision: the world of the Grand Prospect Garden, the clan's private garden where Baoyu and the girls live, is a world of beauty, youth, and poetry that the novel shows being inexorably dismantled by time, economic collapse, and Qing dynasty politics.