The Story of the Stone (Cao Xueqin) (2025)

The Story of the Stone, also known as Hong Lou Meng or Dream of theRed Chamber, is one of the "four great" Chinese novels. Written in themid-18th century, it is set in the aristocratic Jia household in Beijing,a compound of some three hundred people.

Chinese scholars like to compare Cao Xueqin to Shakespeare and havesubjected his novel to similarly intense analysis (a field known as"Redology"), but a better parallel to The Story of the Stone might bethe works of Jane Austen. It has had a huge impact on popular culture,especially as the subject of multiple television and film adaptations,and its characters are widely known. It has a similar focus on socialinteractions within a constrained and rule-bound social world — hereone huge extended family instead of "three or four families in a countryvillage" — and though Cao's humour is quite different and his subjectmaterial is in places much darker, he shares with Austen a playfulnessand a lightness of touch.

In its subject material The Story of the Stone is a far cry fromits peers — The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdomsand Journey to the West — which are full of politics, martialencounters, and adventure. It follows the lives of a "a number offemales, conspicuous, if at all, only for their passion or folly orfor some trifling talent or insignificant virtue", mostly in theirmid-to-late teens. (By some counts there are 108 women involved,supposedly paralleling the heroes of The Water Margin.) At itscentre is Bao-yu, a teenage boy who prefers female company. Born witha jade stone in his mouth and spoilt by a doting grandmother, the familymatriarch, he lives in fear of his father and prefers writing poetry tostudying the classics.

Most of the other characters are related to Bao-yu, who is a kind ofanthropological Ego in the extended Jia kinship network. (Hawkes andMinford thankfully provide a couple of family trees to help the readerfollow these connections, as well as a character list that covers allthe different names of the characters. They have also "translated" thenames of the maids — so Xi-ren becomes Aroma — and Anglicised titles.)

Bao-yu's beautiful cousin Dai-yu is sickly, prone to depression,over-sensitive, always conscious of her status as an orphan, andprone to sarcasm — her nickname is "Frowner". She is also a poet andplayer of the classical qin stringed instrument. In short, a classicRomantic heroine. She and Bao-yu are in love with one another and this,and their continual misunderstandings and Dai-yu's eventual unhappy end,forms one of the novel's central strands.

Contrasted to Dai-yu — and indeed quite deliberately complementing her— is Bao-yu's pragmatic and empathetic cousin Bao-chi, whom he seemsdestined to marry. She is learned but unassuming and always a voiceof commonsense, reason, and compassion; her perspective provides thereader a stable point of return throughout the novel. She is, however,somewhat passionless, and almost too perfect.

Another central character is Bao-yu's cousin's wife, the brash Xi-feng,who through sheer competence — her ability to browbeat the domesticstaff and her skill in keeping her grandmother-in-law happy — has endedup managing the entire household. Xi-feng is capable of affection andeven love, but she is not a good woman to cross, capable of murderousjealousy where her husband is involved. She doesn't always resist thecorruptions of power, either, and resorts to some shady methods in herattempts to balance the family finances. One of the most compellingcharacters in the novel, Xi-feng seems almost to have imposed herselfon the author as well.

Bao-yu's sister Yuan-chun has been raised to become an Imperial Concubine,and features mostly indirectly. His sister Ying-chun is apatheticand withdrawn from the world. His half-sister Tan-chun proves to bemore assertive, almost a peer to Xi-feng. His deceased elder brother'swife Li-wan is an ideal, if rather bland, Confucian widow, dedicated toraising her son. His cousin Xin-chun is a painter and a devout Buddhist.His second cousin Xiang-yun is something of a tomboy, but also a poetand scholar. And then there's the Buddhist nun Adamantina whose originsand eventual fate are both a little mysterious.

Among the older generation, Bao-yu's mother Lady Wang and aunt LadyXing are relative non-entities, but his grandmother Lady Jia is afine portrait. There's also Bao-yu's aunt Xue, Bao-chai's mother,and his scheming aunt Zhao. Several maids are also key characters:Bao-Yu's Aroma and Skybright, whose tragic end is one of the emotionalclimaxes of the novel, Grandmother Jia's loyal Faithful, and Xi-feng'skindly Patience, who smoothes some of her mistress' edges.

Early on, the Jias build a huge pleasure garden, "Prospect Garden",for a visit by the Jia Imperial Concubine. This is subsequently usedto house Bao-yu and all the girls and in the early "golden days" theirlife there is almost idyllic, with their foremost occupation for a whilea poetry club. As the novel proceeds, however, the girls are scattered,by death, dismissal, marriage, and other misfortunes — and for Bao-yu,and by implication Cao Xueqin, marriage really is a misfortune.

The Story of the Stone is a homage to the girls and women Cao Xueqinknew in his youth, but it is not a simple idealisation. Based on his owninterpretation of the concepts of qi (life force, energy) and qing(compassion, empathy), his psychology allowed for complex charactersand his portrayal of women was quite a radical departure from earlierliterature. Whether this makes him some kind of "proto-feminist" isdebatable, but he was certainly a philogynist.

Of the men in the family, the most active is Bao-Chai's brotherXue-Pan, who is something of a rascal and whose misdemeanours andadventures provide many of the external story elements. His concubineCaltrop and his termagant wife Jin-gui are also important. Bao-yu'shalf-brother Huan is a source of mischief-making. Bao-yu's fatherZheng is a scholar-gentleman, but a source of terror to his not verydiligent son. Uncle She is more of a playboy, as is cousin Zhen.Xi-feng's philandering husband Lian is a pale shadow to his wife.And then there are the stewards, cooks, gardeners, page-boys, and soforth, as well as assorted relatives seeking patronage. Jia Yu-cun,who uses his family connections to climb in the bureaucratic hierarchy,is the most notable figure here, with a major role in the framing story.

The Story of the Stone is very much a domestic novel, with its dramasset almost entirely in the household sphere. Much of the "action"involves the characters holding banquets, giving each other preciousobjects, putting on plays, composing poetry, sharing clothing, andso forth. Cao Xueqin has a remarkable ability to lure the reader intocaring about such mundane domestic matters, however, and intertwined withthis is an ever-present background of tension and conflict over status,involving both the family and the servants. Aunt Zhao schemes to raisethe status of her own children by bringing down Xi-feng and Bao-yu.A faction among the domestic staff attempts to unseat the cook.And so on.

In the earlier part of the story, the outside world mostly intrudesin comic "low life" episodes: a schoolboy riot in the clan school,retaliation by Xi-Feng against unwanted advances from a would-be lover,a visit by country bumpkin Grannie Liu, blow-back when an actor Xue Pantakes a fancy for turns out to be a martial-arts expert, and so forth.There are also visits to temples or the imperial court, trade ventures,and exercises of patronage, but mostly these are reported on indirectly.

Events become darker as the story progresses, involving unhappy marriagesand problems with the family finances — the Jia rely on rents from theirland, but are living beyond their means. And the last forty chapters aredarker still, involving politics and the law: Xue Pan ends up in prisonon murder charges, while part of the family falls from imperial grace,is stripped of its title, and has its property confiscated (a similarfate to Cao Xueqin's own family).

The work as a whole is robustly realist, and indeed exhibits quite someskepticism about both religion and the Confucian values at the heart ofChinese society. There is a supernatural frame involving a magic stone,and an early prophetic dream reveals the fates of many of its centralcharacters, but this is used by Cao Xueqin to locate his work in (andto some extent outside) the existing literary tradition. Within thatis a more mundane framing story, which brings key characters to theJia household and helps to locate it geographically and socially.Along with plot elements such as a "mirror protagonist", this alsoreflects an awareness of the creative process itself.

The Story of the Stone reveals a huge amount about everyday(aristocratic but also commoner) life in Qing China, about food anddrink, ceremonies, family structures, the gradations of status, illnessand medicine, astrology, religion, the legal system, and so forth.This is incidental to the story — this is not a historical novel wherethe author might have highlighted this material for its own sake —but is all the more fascinating because of that.

The original work is, like much Chinese literature, littered withreferences to history and literature. These could have been handledwith copious footnoting, but Hawkes and Minford instead opted to addmaterial and sometimes expand dialogue so as to provide any necessarycontext within the text itself. Brief appendices are used for some moreinvolved information, such as an explanation of the significance of theqin stringed instrument, the workings of various drinking games, thestructure of different poetic forms, and so forth. And Minford opts totranslate some Chinese school texts into Latin, which works reasonablywell, at least for readers with the right background.

There is also a considerable amount of embedded poetry, which istranslated into forms which flow naturally in English. This, and thehandling of the poetry exchanges more generally, may not give that muchof a feel for Chinese poetry in itself — a difficult undertaking —but does convey something of its significance for the characters.

The Story of the Stone is divided into five volumes in this translationfor Penguin Classics. The first three, translated by David Hawkes,are the original 80 chapter work which circulated in various partialmanuscripts, possibly before as well as after Cao Xueqin's death in 1764.The last two, translated by John Minford, are the 40 chapter conclusionpublished in 1791, supposedly edited by Gao E from Cao's notes. Hawkes,in his introduction to volume one, suggests they were edited by a familymember before being used by Gao E. Minford, in his introduction to volumefour, suggests they were based on an earlier version of the full work.

There is controversy over the last 40 chapters, since they disagree inplaces with the foreshadowings and prophecies in the first 80, and somescholars claim they are a complete forgery. There are certainly placeswhere, as Minford puts it, the reader "becomes aware of 'somethingmissing'" — they are perhaps starker and less multi-textured.But Minford also writes:

"No amount of scholarly argument has succeeded in supplantingthese last forty chapters as the ending, despite theirshortcomings. They are here to stay, and indeed some of thescenes in them are deservedly among the most famous in thewhole novel."

The Story of the Stone comes to over 2300 pages, even excludingthe introductions in volumes one and four and the brief appendices.This should not be allowed to deter readers, however, as it is remarkablyeasy to read once one gets started. And it really is one of the greatliterary creations of the world.

November 2011

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Related reviews:
- Anthony C. Yu - Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber
- more Chinese literature
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