Life 生平
Cao Xueqin (曹雪芹, c. 1715–1763) is remembered for a single towering achievement, the Qing-dynasty novel 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber), which many readers rank first among the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. He was born into a wealthy family that had enjoyed imperial favor and then lost it, its fortune confiscated, and he wrote much of the novel in poverty drawing heavily on that fall from grace — an unusually intimate, almost documentary attention to the material and emotional life of a great household in decline.
He completed only the first eighty chapters before his death; the remaining forty are traditionally credited to a later editor, Gao E, who prepared the novel for its first printed edition in 1791, decades after Cao's death, though whether Gao worked from Cao's own drafts or largely wrote the ending himself remains disputed. What survives is a work of extraordinary psychological nuance, framing a doomed love triangle within a Buddhist-Daoist meditation on illusion and impermanence.
The novel has sustained an entire scholarly field, known as 'Redology,' devoted to its manuscript history and interpretation — a measure of how much weight later readers have placed on the fragments Cao Xueqin left behind.
Works 作品
Legacy 遺產
紅樓夢 circulated in hand-copied manuscripts before it was ever printed, and the annotated copies that survive — the 脂硯齋 commentaries above all — read like notes from someone who knew the author and knew how the story was meant to end. Reconstructing that lost ending from them is the founding problem of Redology, a field with its own journals, congresses and long-running feuds, and one of the very few branches of literary study organized around a single book.
Outside the seminar room the novel is simply part of the furniture: the 1987 television adaptation is still the definitive version for most Chinese viewers, its characters are shorthand in ordinary conversation, and David Hawkes and John Minford's five-volume The Story of the Stone gave English readers a version good enough to be read for pleasure. Its Chinese is Qing vernacular, closer to modern usage than most classical prose but dense with household detail — the most demanding text in this collection, and the one people spend a lifetime rereading.