Dream of the Red Chamber is a one-volume adaptation of a much longer, three-volume work, sometimes translated into English as A Dream of Red Mansions. It is China's best-known novel. We have based this set of Notes on the three-volume original novel, feeling that the richness of the original work is too important to ignore. However, anyone reading these Notes alongside the more popular (and easier to acquire) one-volume paperback Dream of the Red Chamber should have no difficulty and will appreciate reading about the episodes that Chi-Chen Wang omitted from his adaptation. In addition, because the novel touches on the lives of over 400 characters, we use both the adaptor's English names for key characters and their Chinese names through the first several chapters so that the reader will feel at ease with the Chinese equivalent. For example, we use both "Black Jade" and "Lin Tai-yu" for the same character until the reader feels comfortable referring to the character by her Chinese name.
This massive, sprawling novel of China was written in the mid-eighteenth century, during the Ching Dynasty, and has been widely read during the past two hundred years. Recently, it was made into a miniseries in China.
Tsao Hsueh-chin, the author of A Dream of Red Mansions, was born and raised in an aristocratic family, but he died in misery and isolation. From his own bitter, personal experiences, Tsao created a tragic love story between a young man, Chia Pao-yu, and a young woman, Lin Tai-yu, and, along with their love story, he described in careful detail the ups and downs of four leading aristocratic families: Chia, Shih, Wang, and Hsueh. It is through his precise description of the decline of these four families that we are given a deep and careful analysis and criticism of the Ching Dynasty's economics, politics, culture, education, law, ethics, religion, and marriage, focusing in particular on the social superstructure of the Ching Dynasty, China's last feudal dynasty.
Clearly, this novel is, like life itself, extraordinarily rich. It depicts with artistic appeal and succinctness the hidden crises and various kinds of intricate social conflicts of the declining feudal society, while offering us many different characteristics of many different kinds of people. The novel has profound social significance and a high historical value. It is generally regarded as China's greatest novel.
