A Dream of Red Mansions

The celebrated Chinese classic novel is a masterpiece of realism written in the middle of the-eighteenth century. Taking as its background the decline of several related big families and drawing much from his own experiences, the author Cao Xueqin (?-c.1763) focused on the tragic love between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu and, in the meantime, provides a panorama of the lives of people of various levels in the degenerating empire. But he left the work unfinished (or the last 40 chapters lost). Gao E (c.1738-c.1815) completed the work some years later in much of Cao's spirit and also put in his own revelation, which aroused protracted controversy throughout centuries. Exposing social evils, the book cries out denunciation against the feudal system. All techniques of literary merit developed in previous periods have been incorporated into the great work with much originality. It stands out in the world literature ranking with Hamlet and War and Peace.