[In this essay, Hsia introduces Hung-lou men, translated often as The Dream of the Red Chamber or as A Dream of Red Mansions, to a Western reading audience. Hsia argues that the novel is the culmination of the development of the Chinese novel through the Ming and early Ch'ing period, drawing from earlier landmark works including Chin p'ing mei.]

The Chinese novel Hung-lou meng is customarily known in English as The Dream of the Red Chamber (with or without the initial particle) because earlier partial translations bear this rather enigmatic title. Today, however, its continuing use is unjustified since we have a complete translation in three volumes by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978-80) under the apt title A Dream of Red Mansions. Another complete translation in five volumes by David Hawkes and John Minford is called The Story of the Stone (New York: Penguin Books, 1973-86), which accurately renders the novel's alternative title Shih-t'ou chi. However, since the work is best known in Chinese as Hung-lou meng, A Dream of Red Mansions should be its preferred title in English even though the Hawkes-Minford version is richer in style and more interesting to read.

A Dream of Red Mansions is the greatest novel in the Chinese literary tradition. As an eighteenth-century work, it draws fully upon that tradition, and can indeed be regarded as its crowning achievement. As that tradition is early distinguished by its poetry and philosophy, we expectedly find in Dream numerous poems in a variety of meters, including an elegy in the style of the Ch'u tz'u (Songs of the South, an ancient anthology), along with philosophic conversations that echo the sages of antiquity (Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Mencius) and utilize the subtle language of Zen Buddhism. As a late traditional man of letters, its principal author is further aware of the encyclopedic scope of Chinese learning and the heritage of earlier fiction and drama. He has made obvious use of the Ming domestic novel Chin P'ing Mei and the romantic masterpieces of Yüan-Ming drama such as The Romance of the Western Chamber (Hsi-hsiang chi) and The Peony Pavilion (Mu-tan t'ing). But his novel is greater than these not only for its fuller representation of Chinese culture and thought but for its incomparably richer delineation of characters in psychological terms. That latter achievement must be solely credited to the genius of its principal author.

That author is Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in (1715?-1763), an ethnic Chinese from a family that had served the Manchu emperors of the Ch'ing dynasty for generations. Though mere bondservants to the throne in status, Ts'ao's great grandfather, grandfather, and father or uncle all held the highly lucrative post of commissioner of Imperial Textile Mills, first briefly in Soochow and then in Nanking. The grandfather Ts'ao Yin played host to the K'ang-hsi emperor during his four southern excursions from Peking. But the Yung-cheng emperor, who succeeded K'ang-hsi in 1723, was far less friendly to the Ts'ao house. In 1728 he dismissed Ts'ao Fu, most probably Hsüeh-ch'in's father, from his post as textile commissioner of Nanking and confiscated much of his property. Then thirteen or fourteen years old, Hsüeh-ch'in moved with his parents to Peking in much reduced circumstances. It is believed that the Ts'ao clan temporarily regained favor after the Ch'ien-lung emperor ascended the throne in 1736. But by 1744, when Hsüeh-ch'in started composing his novel, he had moved to the western suburbs of Peking, again living in poverty: the Ts'ao family must have suffered another disaster from which it never recovered. The novelist had lost a young son a few months before his death in February 1763 and was survived by a second wife, of whom we know nothing further.

By all indications Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in should have had ample time to complete Dream to his own satisfaction, but it would seem that at the time of his death this novel of autobiographical inspiration—about a great family in decline and its young heir—was not yet in publishable shape even though manuscripts of the first eighty chapters, known by title as The Story of the Stone, had been in circulation for some time. Scholars now believe that Ts'ao must have completed at least one draft of the whole novel, but went on revising it, partly to please the commentators among his kinsmen, prominently a cousin known by his studio name of Red Inkstone (Chih-yen Chai), and partly to remove any grounds for suspicion that his work was critical of the government in devoting space to the tribulations of a family justly deserving of imperial punishment. If Ts'ao had indeed completed the last portion of the novel but didn't allow it to circulate, it could have been due to fear of a literary inquisition.

A corrected second edition of the 120-chapter Dream of Red Mansions came out in 1792, only a few months after the first edition of 1791. The new edition contains, in addition to the original preface by Ch'eng Wei-yüan, a new preface by Kao Ê, and a joint foreword by the two. Earlier scholars have arbitrarily taken Ch'eng to be a bookseller who had acquired manuscripts of the later chapters and had asked the scholar Kao Ê to put them into shape and edit the work as a whole. Some would even regard Kao Ê as a forger. Now we know that Ch'eng Wei-yüan was a staff member of the gigantic imperial project to assemble a “Complete Library in Four Branches of Learning and Literature” (Ssu-k'u ch'üan-shu). Ho-shen, a Manchu minister enjoying the complete trust of the Ch'ien-lung emperor, was made a director general of the project, and according to a new theory advanced by Chou Ju-ch'ang, a leading authority on the novel, it was Ho-shen himself who had ordered Ch'eng and Kao to prepare a politically harmless version for the perusal of the emperor. This theory should be taken seriously inasmuch as Ch'eng and Kao could not have dreamed of putting out a movable type edition of a massive novel without the backing of a powerful minister like Ho-shen and without the printing facilities of the imperial court.

Whatever its faults, the Ch'eng-Kao edition has remained the standard text for Chinese readers for two hundred years. Scholars, of course, will continue to regret that Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in did not live long enough to complete or oversee the publication of his own novel, and belittle or give grudging praise to Kao Ê's contributions as an editor and continuator of the first eighty chapters. But if the last forty chapters are not what they should be, the first eighty are also by no means a coherent narrative of seamless unity. In addition to minor inconsistencies in the story line, Ts'ao's inveterate habit for revision would seem to be responsible for more serious instances of narrative ineptitude as well. One plausible theory (endorsed by David Hawkes) proposes that even before starting on his great project, Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in had acquired or himself written a manuscript called A Mirror for the Romantic (Feng-yüeh pao-chien), about unhappy youths and maidens belatedly awakened to the illusory nature of love. He was apparently very fond of this manuscript and inserted some of its cautionary tales into his novel. He did so, of course, at the cost of upsetting its temporal scheme since the autobiographical hero and his female cousins lead quite unhurried lives while the trials of the deluded Chia Jui in chapter 12 and of the hapless Yu sisters in chapters 64-67 consume weeks in a matter of pages. Try as he might, Ts'ao could not have got himself out of this narrative impasse if he was determined to save these somewhat extraneous tales.

The story of the novel's composition and publication remains thus a very complicated affair demanding further research by specialists. The novel itself, however, should pose few difficulties for the Western reader unless he is intimidated right away by its sheer size. But the undaunted reader will be amply rewarded and will cherish the experience of having spent days and weeks with many memorable characters in a Chinese setting. A Dream of Red Mansions is about the aristocratic Chia clan which, like the Ts'ao family, has enjoyed imperial favor for generations. Its two main branches dwell in adjoining compounds in the capital, styled Ningkuofu and Jungkuofu. The nominal head of the Ningkuofu is a selfish student of Taoist alchemy who eventually dies its victim; his son Chia Chen and grandson Chia Yung are both sensualists. Grandmother Chia, also known as the Lady Dowager in the Yang translation, presides over the Jungkuofu. She has two sons, Chia She and Chia Cheng. Chia Lien, Chia She's pleasure-seeking son, is married to an extremely capable woman, Wang Hsi-feng. Despite her early triumphs in managing the household finances and driving her love rivals to suicide, this handsome and vivacious lady eventually languishes in ill health and dies. Her nefarious dealings are in large part responsible for the raiding of the Chia compounds by imperial guards and the confiscation of their property.

The Dowager's other son, Chia Cheng, is the only conscientious Confucian member of the family in active government service. A lonely man of narrow vision but undeniable rectitude, he has lost a promising son before the novel opens. Naturally, he expects his younger son by his legitimate wife, Lady Wang, to study hard and prepare for the civil service examinations. But Pao-yü, early spoiled by his grandmother, mother, and other female relatives, detests conventional learning and prefers the company of his girl cousins and the maidservants. Since late childhood, he has had as playmate a cousin of delicate beauty beloved by the Dowager, Lin Tai-yü. Some years later, another beautiful cousin, Hsüeh Pao-ch'ai, also moves into the Jungkuofu. In spite of Pao-yü's repeated assurances of his love, Tai-yü regards Pao-ch'ai as her rival and feels very insecure. As she progressively ruins her health by wallowing in self-pity, Pao-ch'ai replaces her as the family's preferred candidate for Pao-yü's wife. But the marriage when it does take place brings no joy to Pao-ch'ai since by that time Pao-yü has turned into an idiot. Broken-hearted and full of unforgiveness, Tai-yü dies on their wedding night.

Pao-yü eventually recovers and obtains the degree of chü-jen. But instead of returning home after taking the examination, he renounces the world and becomes a monk. The desolate Pao-ch'ai takes comfort in her pregnancy. A faithful maid, Hsi-jen (called Aroma in Hawkes and Minford) is eventually happily married to an actor friend of Pao-yü's. Another maid, Ch'ing-wen (Skybright in Hawkes and Minford), to whom Pao-yü was also much attached, had died of calumny and sickness long before his marriage.

Chinese novels before Dream are mostly about characters in history and legend. Though a type of short novel about talented and good-looking young lovers had become popular before his time, Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in quite properly dismisses these stereotyped romances in his novel for their palpable unreality. But his use of what we may call diurnal realism, the technique of advancing the novel with seemingly inconsequential accounts of day-to-day events and of lingering over days of family significance, clearly shows his indebtedness to the aforementioned Chin P'ing Mei, the only one of the four major Ming novels devoted to tracing the fortunes of a discordant large family. (The other three, all available in English translation, are: Romance of the Three Kingdoms [San-kuo-chih yen-i], Outlaws of the Marsh [Shui-hu chuan], and The Journey to the West [Hsi-yu chi].) But whereas Chin P'ing Mei is notorious for its graphic descriptions of Hsi-men Ch'ing's sexual life with his concubines and paramours, Dream is never pornographic despite its larger cast of male sensualists. The novel maintains instead a note of high culture by focusing attention on the hero and on several gifted young ladies whose poetic parties and conversations with him invariably touch upon intellectual and aesthetic matters. The life story of Chia Pao-yü, especially, is tested against all the major ideals of Chinese culture.

At the very beginning of the first chapter, Ts'ao places his hero in a creation myth that mocks his Faustian desire for experience, knowledge, and pleasure. When the goddess Nü-kua is repairing the Dome of Heaven, she rejects as unfit for use a huge rock of considerable intelligence, which consequently bemoans its fate and develops a longing for the pleasures of the mundane world. It can now turn itself into the size of a stone and, with the help of a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest, it is eventually born with a piece of jade in his mouth as our hero (Pao-yü means “precious jade”). As a supramundane allegory, then, Dream is the transcription of a record as inscribed on the Stone itself after it had returned to its original site in the Green Fable Mountains. The Stone has found human life wanting, its pleasures and pains all illusory, and its detailed record—our novel—is by allegorical design a massive substantiation of that truth. Throughout the novel, the celestial agents of that allegory, the mangy Buddhist and lame Taoist, while watching over the spiritual welfare of Pao-yü, periodically mock or enlighten other deluded earthlings as well.

Chia Pao-yü is next characterized in chapter 2 by two knowledgeable outsiders as an unconventional individualist of the romantic tradition firmly opposed to the Confucian ideal of morality and service as represented by his father. To illustrate his propensity for love, our hero, while taking a nap in the bedchamber of Ch'in K'o-ch'ing (Chia Yung's wife) in chapter 5, is transported to the Land of Illusion presided over by the fairy Disenchantment. After warning him of the dangers of the kind of crazy love (ch'ih ch'ing) prized by the romantics, she introduces her own sister to him for the purpose of sexual initiation so that he may see through the vanity of passion and return to the path of Confucian service. The fairy Ko-ch'ing, who combines in her person the charms of both Tai-yü and Pao-ch'ai, of course enraptures Pao-yü, but he soon wakes up screaming after being chased by demons and wild beasts.

When lecturing Pao-yü, the fairy Disenchantment does allow a distinction between lust (yin) and love (ch'ing), and as someone truly committed to ch'ing (also meaning “feeling”), our hero is in no danger of being confused with several of his kinsmen who are often driven by lust to trample upon human feelings. But Pao-yü is so free of the taint of lust that the dream allegory confuses matters by presenting him as someone desperate for salvation after only a brief interlude of sexual bliss. Contrary to popular belief among Chinese readers, Pao-yü is not a great lover, nor does he function principally as a lover in the novel. It is true that remembrance of the sweeter portion of the dream has led him to make love to the maid Aroma the same evening. For all we know they may continue to share sexual intimacy thereafter, but his enjoyment of her body, explicitly referred to only once and rarely emphasized again, alters not a whit his high regard for her as a person and a friend. Pao-yü is actually more drawn to his other maid Skybright because of her entrancing beauty and fiery temperament, but she dies complaining of being a virgin, untouched by her young master.

Pao-yü is every girl's true friend. Once the Takuanyüan, a spacious garden built in honor of his elder sister, an imperial concubine, becomes the residential quarters of Pao-yü and his girl cousins, he sees them and their maids all the time and gives daily proof of his unfeigned friendship and solicitude for their welfare. He admires each and every one of these girls as an embodiment of celestial beauty and understanding, but worries about the time when they will leave the garden to get married. He knows only too well that with marriage their celestial essence will be obscured and that, if they survive their unhappiness, they will become as meanspirited as the older women in the Chia mansions.

As the sole young master in the Takuanyüan, Pao-yü therefore does his best to keep the young ladies and maids amused and to lull their awareness of the misery of approaching adulthood. But for all their lively parties and conversations, the young ladies have to leave one by one, by marriage, death, or abduction (in the case of the resident nun Miao-yü). It is these tragedies that reduce our helpless hero to a state of idiocy and prepare him for his eventual acceptance of his fate as an insensible Stone, regardless of suffering humanity. In that allegorical dream, the fairy Disenchantment has warned him only of his romantic propensity. But though he is grievously hurt when his elders rob him of his intended bride and marry him to Pao-ch'ai, ordinarily he is much more occupied by the tragic fate of Tai-yü, and of all other girls deprived of life or happiness. In accordance with the author's allegoric scheme, we should perhaps feel happy that he has finally gained wisdom and leaves this world of suffering for the life of a monk. But we cannot help feeling that his spiritual wisdom is gained at the expense of his most endearing trait—his active love and compassion for fellow human beings. Despite his irrepressible charm and gaiety, Chia Pao-yü must be regarded as the most tragic hero in all Chinese literature for ultimately choosing the path of self-liberation because his sympathy and compassion have failed him.

Pao-yü has a few like-minded male friends whom he sees occasionally, but inside the Chia mansions there are no men to whom he can unburden his soul. Even if he is not partial to girls, he has only these to turn to for genuine companionship. And it is a tribute to Ts'ao's extraordinary genius that he is able to provide him with so many sharply individualized companions to talk and joke with, to compete as poets, and to care for and love. Among these, Lin Tai-yü naturally takes pride of place as the principal heroine with whose fate Pao-yü is most concerned. Alone of the major heroines, she is assigned a role in the supramundane allegory complementary to the hero's. She is supposed to be a plant that blossoms into a fairy after the Stone, then serving as a page at the court of Disenchantment, has daily sprinkled it with dew. The fairy has vowed to repay his kindness with tears if she may join him on earth, and judging by the occasions Tai-yü has to cry while living as an orphan among relatives, never sure of her status in the Jungkuofu nor of her marital future, she has certainly more than repaid her debt to her former benefactor.

Yet as is the case with Pao-yü's allegoric dream, Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in almost deliberately misleads with his fairy tale about Tai-yü as a grateful plant. The reality of the two cousins in love is far more complex and fascinating than any allegory can suggest. Long before Tai-yü is in danger of being rejected by her elders, she seethes with discontent. Her every meeting with Pao-yü ends in a misunderstanding or quarrel, and these quarrels are, for her, fraught with bitter and lacerated feelings. This is so because the two are diametrically opposed in temperament despite the similarity of their tastes. Pao-yü is a person of active sympathy capable of ultimate self-transcendence; Tai-yü is a self-centered neurotic who courts self-destruction. Her attraction for Pao-yü lies not merely in her fragile beauty and poetic sensibility but in her very contrariness—a jealous self-obsession so unlike his expansive gaiety that his love for her is always tinged with infinite sadness.

Tai-yü, on her part, can never be sure of Pao-yü's love and yet maintains a fierce pride in her studied indifference to her marital prospects. One could almost say that her tragedy lies in her stubborn impracticality, in the perverse contradiction between her very natural desire to get married to the man of her choice and her fear of compromising herself in the eyes of the world by doing anything to bring about that result. In time her temper gets worse, and so does her health. Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in never flinches from physiological details as he traces her growing emotional sickness in terms of her bodily deterioration. Her dream scene in chapter 82, where Pao-yü slashes open his chest in order to show her his heart and finds it missing, and her ghastly death scene in chapter 98 are among the most powerful in the novel. Kao Ê must be given high praise if he had indeed a substantial hand in the writing of these chapters.

Because Pao-ch'ai nominally gets her man, Chinese readers partial to Tai-yü are less sympathetic toward her, and find personal satisfaction in seeing her as a hypocritical schemer. This misreading is, of course, unwarranted. It is true that, as a sensible girl docilely accepting her place in a Confucian society, she may have less appeal for Pao-yü and for the modern reader than Tai-yü with her neurotic sensibility and volatile temper. Yet both are strictly comparable in talent and beauty, and both are fatherless children living more or less as dependents among relatives. Though Tai-yü is initially jealous, they become the best of friends after chapter 45: two helpless pawns in the hands of their elders with no control over their marital fate. If the elders prefer Pao-ch'ai as Pao-yü's bride, at the same time they show little regard for her welfare. Though Pao-yü was once a desirable match, by the time the wedding is proposed he is a very sick person with no immediate prospect for recovery. Even more than Tai-yü, Pao-ch'ai is the victim of a cruel hoax, since there can be no doubt that the hastily arranged wedding is regarded by the elder Chia ladies as medicine for Pao-yü's health. For Pao-ch'ai's martyrdom their brutal and desperate self-interest is alone responsible.

As the wife of Pao-yü, Pao-ch'ai remains to the end a Confucian trying to dissuade him from the path of self-liberation. She is in that respect not unlike his parents in wishing to see him enter government service and get settled as a family man. But in the end she uses the Mencian argument to counter his Taoist resolve to leave the world. Even if the world is full of evil and suffering, or especially because it is so, how can he bear to sever human ties, to leave those who need his love most? How can one remain human by denying the most instinctive promptings of his heart? Pao-ch'ai cannot figure this out, and Pao-yü cannot answer her on the rational level of human discourse. It is only by placing human life in the cosmological scheme of craving and suffering that one can see the need to liberate oneself. It would be too cruel even for the enlightened Pao-yü to tell Pao-ch'ai that to cling to love and compassion is to persist in delusion: in the primordial antiquity of Taoism there was no need to love or commiserate.

As a tragedy, A Dream of Red Mansions has thus the overtones of a bitter and sardonic comedy. The Buddhist-Taoist view of the world prevails in the end, and yet the reader cannot but feel that the reality of love and suffering as depicted in the novel stirs far deeper layers of his being than the reality of Buddhist-Taoist wisdom. This Chinese masterpiece is therefore like all the greatest novels of the world in that no philosophic or religious message one extracts therefrom can at all do justice to its unfolding panorama of wondrous but perverse humanity. For any reader who would like a panoramic view of traditional Chinese life through the portrayal of many unforgettable characters in an authentic social and cultural setting there can be no richer and more fascinating work than Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in's A Dream of Red Mansions.