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Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone)
9Cao Xueqin
Widely regarded as the greatest Chinese novel ever written — Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century portrait of an aristocratic family's decline sustains an entire field of Chinese literary criticism (Hongxue) devoted to it.
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ISBN 9780140443264Summary & Critical Assessment (Score: 9/10)
Dream of the Red Chamber is widely regarded as the supreme achievement of Chinese fiction and one of the greatest novels in any language. Through the rise and fall of the aristocratic Jia family and the doomed adolescent love between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu, Cao Xueqin produced a work of psychological depth, social observation, and lyrical beauty that has been compared to Proust, Tolstoy, and Murasaki Shikibu's Genji.
Cao Xueqin (c. 1715–1763) worked on the novel for the last decade of his life, drawing on the spectacular fall of his own once-favored Manchu family. He left only eighty chapters complete; the final forty were filled out, controversially, by Gao E for the 1791 Cheng–Gao printed edition. The novel sustains a uniquely Chinese genre of literary criticism known as Hongxue — "Red-ology" — devoted entirely to its interpretation. David Hawkes and John Minford's five-volume Penguin translation, completed across thirteen years, is universally regarded as one of the finest literary translations of the twentieth century.
The Revolutionary Decade, 1776-1781
1776: the Declaration of Independence is signed, Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations, and Gibbon begins his Decline and Fall — three foundational texts within months. Five years later, Kant publishes the Critique of Pure Reason — a 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy. The ancien regime in France is already rotting from within.
Awards & Adaptations
Penguin Classics. Hongxue (Red-ology) is an entire academic field. The 1987 CCTV adaptation is considered a national treasure.
Recommended Edition
David Hawkes and John Minford, The Story of the Stone (Penguin Classics, 5 vols, 1973–1986)
