Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (1791)

Every spring the peach blossoms fall across the Grand View Garden, and Lin Daiyu cannot stand to see them trampled into the mud: she gathers the fallen petals and buries them in the earth, weeping for the flowers and, without knowing it, for herself. Her grief over a handful of blossoms is the grief Cao Xueqin pours over a whole vanished world. He grew up inside one of Qing China's great households, his family imperial textile commissioners for three generations, then watched the wealth and the long seasons of poetry contests and chrysanthemum wine fall away. Into the Jia family's garden he set everything he could not bear to lose: a recipe, a riddle, the remedy for a cough, and at its heart Baoyu, the boy born with a jade in his mouth, who loves Daiyu as if they had known each other before either was born. His family means him for someone steadier. She burns her poems, page by page, in the brazier. To build a world this tenderly, the novel knows, is the longest way of saying goodbye.