Dream of the Red Chamber Reading Order

Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1750s), 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 family's decline told through the love story of Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu, two cousins of extraordinary sensitivity doomed to lose each other in a world of social obligation. Cao Xueqin wrote eighty chapters before his death; the final forty were completed by Gao E and published in 1791. The novel contains more than four hundred characters, evokes the full texture of eighteenth-century Chinese elite culture — poetry, cuisine, garden design, ritual, cosmetics, medicine — and weaves an elaborate allegory of spiritual descent into flesh. It is the source of an entire academic discipline in China ('Redology') and remains the most widely read novel in the Chinese-speaking world.