The Dream of Red Mansion
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Why is China’s greatest novel virtually unknown in the west?
When I was a graduate student in Oxford many years ago I shared a house with a brilliant German sinologist who used to push translations my way, stroking his beard with a teasing smile: “Try this – you’ll really enjoy it.” Many visitors popped into our terraced house on Abingdon Road, and one night around the kitchen table I met a fascinating character, rangy with white hair and beard, and a twinkly eye. His name was David Hawkes. A gifted linguist, he had directed Japanese codebreakers in his early 20s, during the second world war. As a student at Peking University, he had been in Tiananmen Square in 1949 when Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Later, as a teacher, he had done a wonderful translation of the Songs of the South, part of a poetic tradition earlier than anything that has survived in the west. Then he became professor of Chinese in Oxford, but, as he put it, “I resigned in order to devote my time to translating a Chinese novel … well, the Chinese novel”. The book was Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, written by Cao Xueqin. The critic Anthony West called it “one of the great novels of world literature … to the Chinese as Proust is to the French or Karamazov to the Russians”. An illustration from the book Facebook Twitter Pinterest An illustration from the book Hawkes eventually completed his great endeavour with the help of his son-in-law John Minford, who finished the last two volumes of the five, which were published by Penguin between 1973 and 1986. Hawkes’s translation was greeted as an introduction to “a masterpiece”, a “work of genius”, a “candidate for the Book of the Millennium”. When Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was given a copy of Shakespeare during his state visit to the UK, the new Chinese ambassador Fu Ying gave the queen the Hawkes translation. Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter Read more The novel is an 18th-century saga, the tale of a noble family that falls from grace. It is full of incredible detail of the social, cultural and spiritual life of the time. Chairman Mao claimed to have read it five times – and thought everyone else should too. Today, everyone in China knows it, partly due to the much-loved 1987 TV version, which had the impact of the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice in the UK. Dream of the Red Chamber was written in the 1750s “by a great artist with his very lifeblood”, said Hawkes. Cao’s story mirrors the tale of his own family. His grandfather, Cao Yin, was an imperial bondservant, an important functionary in the south, who enjoyed high favour with the emperor Kangxi. But after Kangxi died, his son began a purge of corruption and incompetence, and the family were ruined. They lost their mansion in Nanjing and moved to a modest house among the alleys of Beijing, south-east of the Forbidden City. So Yin’s grandson grew up in straitened circumstances, a brilliant but watchful boy, wary of all power, and never forgetting his grandad’s saying about the fickleness of fortune: “When the tree falls, the monkeys will be scattered.” He was good with the brush, both with paint and with words: but he had no aptitude for university, so he found himself down and out in his 30s, selling his paintings and working as a private teacher (he was eventually sacked for getting a maidservant pregnant.) By the end he was sleeping in barns and working in wine shops; he clearly drank too much. A performance of Dream of the Red Chamber at the Cairo Opera House in 2010. A performance of Dream of the Red Chamber at the Cairo Opera House in 2010. The book was written in dribs and drabs: each new chapter circulated among family and friends, often in exchange for a meal and a pitcher of wine. He died in 1763, heartbroken it is said, by the death of his only son. Dream of the Red Chamber was finally published in print in 1791, but the text is still surrounded by controversy. There is a story that it had been censored because eminent people it satirised had been too thinly disguised. It is also debated whether the text we have is all his. Different endings survive, with a writer called Gao E claiming to have published the complete version according to the author’s wishes. Today, “redology” (Red Chamber obsessives are known as “redologists”) is a massive and still expanding field in China, with conferences, annual journals and a torrent of publications. Manuscripts still turn up. Mysteries remain unsolved. Advertisement Hawkes’s version gives us the first 80 chapters by Cao and the last 40 redacted by Gao E, who it seems fair to assume was using an unfinished draft and clearly knew what the author had planned. It is a different kind of novel from earlier Chinese classics such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin and Monkey, the latter a vast sprawling narrative, surreal and poignant, full of songs and poems. The female characters are especially strong. As Cao himself said: “Having made an utter failure of my life, one day I found myself in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them in my mind’s eye one by one it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls – which is all they were then – were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the ‘grave and moustachioed signor’ I am now supposed to have become. The realisation brought with it an overpowering sense of shame … And I resolved then, however unsightly my shortcomings might be, I must not, for the sake of keeping them hid, allow those wonderful girls to pass into oblivion without a memorial.” The book as it stands in the Penguin version runs to 2,500 pages – twice as long as War and Peace. Hard going at first because of the myriad characters (there are 40 main ones) and their (to a non-Chinese eye) difficult names. But once you are into it, it is a book into which the reader can completely immerse herself; it is like nothing else in all of literature. Having just watched his thrilling adaptation of War and Peace, all I can say is: “Over to you, Andrew Davies.” • The Story of China is on BBC2 on Thursday.
A Dream of Red Mansions
A Dream of Red Mansions, or Chronicles of the Stone, is the greatest masterpiece of Chinese classical novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties with the most profound influence on later generations. The work is comprised of 120 chapters, the first 80 of which were written by Tsao Hsueh-chin and the remaining 40 by Kao Hgo. Tsao Hsueh-chin, the author of A Dream of Red Mansions, lived between 1715 and 1763. His ancestral family once held great power. As such, he led a wealthy noble life in Nanjing as a child. When he was 13 or 14, the family was declining and moved to Beijing, where life took a turn for the worse. In his later years, he even led a poor life. Drawing on his own experience, Tsao Hsueh-chin put all his life experiences, poeticized feelings, exploratory spirit and creativity into the greatest work of all time - A Dream of Red Mansions. Drawing its materials from real life, the novel is full of the author’s personal feelings filled with blood and tears. A Dream of Red Mansions is a novel with great cultural richness. It depicts a multi-layered yet inter-fusing tragic human world through the eye of a talentless stone the Goddess used for sky mending. Jia Baoyu, the incarnation of the stone, witnessed the tragic lives of “the Twelve Beauties of Nanjing”, experienced the great changes from flourishing to decline of a noble family and thus gained unique perception of life and the mortal world. Revolving around Jia Baoyu and focusing on the tragic love between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai against the backdrop of the Great View Garden, the novel portrays a tragedy in which love, youth and life are ruined as well as exposes and profoundly reflects the root of the tragedy – the feudal system and culture. The great literature success of A Dream of Red Mansions is remarkably reflected by the creation of characters with distinctive personality and profound social culture, mirroring people in real life. The success also lies in the breakthrough and innovation of traditional writing styles, completely breaking the mode of story-telling popular novels and greatly enriching the narrative art of novels, thus causing a far-reaching impact on the development of Chinese novels. The influence of A Dream of Red Mansions in the history of Chinese literature is so profound that it has spawned a large batch of works after its style. At the same time, numerous plays and dramas based on the novel have been released. In recent years, movies and TV series have brought the great work to tens of thousands of households, sweeping the whole Chinese-speaking world. The exceptionally superb creation of artistic characters and the richness of the thoughts in the novel of A Dream of Red Mansions have generated great interest in its reviews and research, forming a special subject dedicated solely to the research of the novel – Redology (the study on the novel A Dream of Red Mansions). The great work of A Dream of Red Mansions belongs to China and the whole world. It’s gradually becoming the spiritual wealth shared by all people of the globe.
China's Story of the Stone: the best book you’ve never heard of
The death of the elderly Chinese scholar Zhou Ruchang, noted recently in a Daily Telegraph obituary, draws attention to a startling fact: that China’s greatest work of literature, the 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, on which Professor Zhou was an acknowledged – and somewhat obsessive – expert, is still virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. And yet a complete and highly readable English translation has been available in Penguin Classics for nearly 30 years. In its native land, The Story of the Stone, as the book is also known – Stone for short – enjoys a unique status, comparable to the plays of Shakespeare. Apart from its literary merits, Chinese readers recommend it as the best starting point for any understanding of Chinese psychology, culture and society. So why is this masterpiece so neglected in the West? Does it just reflect a general decline of interest in literature? Or is there something particular about the Chinese case? Are we, perhaps, too obsessed with China’s latest economic statistics to spare a thought for what’s left of its soul? As one philistine academic colleague growled at me not long ago, “Who cares about Chinese poetry anyway?” In British universities, teachers of traditional Chinese literature are in danger of becoming extinct. For the Chinese, however, The Story of the Stone is a talisman. Three years ago, Madame Fu Ying, Chinese ambassador to the Court of St James (now deputy foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China, and a rising star), demonstrated this when she presented the complete five-volume Penguin edition to the Queen. On my arrival in China in 1980, I was advised by Yang Xianyi, one of Stone’s Beijing translators, that if ever I found myself in a fix with the authorities, I should mention my own connection with the book. I once tested this theory, with the Public Security Bureau – and it worked. The book was left unfinished by the author Cao Xueqin at his death in 1763 and was eventually published in 1792, with an added conclusion attributed to Gao E. It is written in high-class Peking vernacular, with many unusual expressions and allusions, necessitating dozens of footnotes per chapter for today’s readers. But despite this, and despite its daunting length (twice as long as War and Peace) and its huge dramatis personae (well over 300 main characters), it is still widely read throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Mention of it triggers an instant gleam of recognition, and opens up new possibilities of communication. Related Articles China censors anniversary of high-speed rail crash 23 Jul 2012 Ai Weiwei loses China tax case 20 Jul 2012 Fears of Chinese media crackdown ahead of leadership transition 18 Jul 2012 The 'truth' deleted from internet in China 12 Jul 2012 At the centre of the plot is a love triangle involving Baoyu, a young aristocratic fop, and his two girl-cousins. These characters divide readers into fiercely opposing camps: some prefer the wilting, anorexic beauty of Miss Lin Daiyu, others admire the healthier, more down-to-earth charms of her rival, Xue Baochai; as for Baoyu, readers either adore him and his aesthetic ecstasies, or consider him a self-indulgent sentimentalist. The story has been adapted countless times into film, drama, opera, and twice into lavish multi-part TV series. Chairman Mao and his last wife, Jiang Qing, were both Stone-aficionados. He lectured his subjects on the need to read it five times, while his secretary, Hu Qiaomu, claimed that the Great Helmsman himself had read it 25 times. A young graduate student from China once told me she read it in winter to keep warm, in summer to keep cool. What is so special about this work? Why does it continue to cast its spell on today’s Chinese readers? One has to try to imagine a book that combines the qualities of Jane Austen – brilliantly observed accounts of Chinese psychology and personality, meticulous depiction of an aristocratic Chinese/Manchu household – with the grand sweep of a novel such as Vanity Fair or the works of Balzac. Its mood is allegorical, lyrical and philosophical. It leaves the reader with a visionary experience of the human condition, comparable to that of Proust. It’s a blend of Zen Buddhism and Taoism with the underlying theme of “seeing through the Red Dust” beyond the illusion of earthly “reality”. The Stone narrates the journey of a sensitive soul towards enlightenment. That “soul” is Jia Baoyu, the incarnation of the “stone” of the title, a delicate teenager, a dreamer, a pampered aesthete “in love with love”. In the fifth chapter he retires from a family afternoon gathering to take a nap in the boudoir of his cousin Jia Rong’s beautiful young wife. His visit, in a dream, to the Land of Illusion is described, where a fairy named Disenchantment reveals the predestined futures of many of his girl-cousins and maids, at the same time gently berating him for being such a lustful creature (in his case it is Lust of the Mind). She initiates him into the art of love with a beautiful girl, Two-in-One, so called because she combines the charms of his two favourite girl-cousins. After the dream, his maid, Aroma, proceeds to practice with him some of the “lessons” taught him by the Fairy in his “initiatory dream”. This intertwining of desire and enlightenment, of passion and disenchantment, lies at the heart of the novel. And yet, despite its philosophical and allegorical dimension, Stone is no Pilgrim’s Progress. It is full of fun and games, describing the illusion of daily “reality” in loving detail. Its pages make up a veritable encyclopedia of Chinese life, from the making of tea with last year’s melted snow, to the eating of crabs, the performing of lyrical opera and the writing of classical verse in every possible metre. To offset the large cast of upper-class characters, there is also a wonderful assortment of low-life personalities, old village dames, garrulous matrons, drunken retainers, martial artists, sing-song girls and theatrical performers. It convincingly describes the corruption and other social ills that beset China’s society in the late traditional period (and in many ways still do). Its rich social tapestry, and its pervading philosophical theme, take this novel far beyond the scope of the sentimental Chinese novel so popular in the 18th century. Written just before the onset of China’s 19th-century decline, Stone captures brilliantly the “glory that was China”, and the knife edge on which that glory balanced. This is what makes it such essential reading today. John Minford is Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University. He translated 'The Story of the Stone’ for Penguin with David Hawkes
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1 Dream of the Red Chamber (original title 红楼梦) is considered one of the Four Great Classics of Chinese literature
2 The Dream of Re d Mansionitself has given rise to a paper mountain of critical commentary, known as Redology紅學.
3 ‘Red’, then, in the Dream of Red Mansion represents the world of art and beauty, literature and scholarship, rite and ceremony, manners and etiquette, which bind the family and the wider society together.