Dream of the Red Chamber
by Cao Xueqin(1791)
NovelChinese
“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true; real becomes not-real where the unreal's real.”
Dream of the Red Chamber
Cao Xueqin(1791)
A jade stone, rejected by the goddess who repaired the sky, begs to be carried into the mortal world to experience its splendors and its sorrows, and so begins the great novel of Chinese literature. Composed in the mid-eighteenth century from the ruin of Cao Xueqin's own once-magnificent family, the book circulated in manuscript before appearing in print around 1791. Within the vast Jia household, hundreds of characters love, scheme, compose poetry, and decline, but at the center stand Baoyu and Daiyu, cousins whose spiritual bond cannot survive the world's coarseness. The novel moves between the celestial and the domestic with effortless grace. Every garden party contains the seed of its own autumn.
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