Vanished Splendour: The Dream of the Red Chamber/红楼梦

Memories of reading 红楼梦/what I learnt from reading 红楼梦.

A scene from The Dream of the Red Chamber: Lin Daiyu burying flowers (chapters 23 & 33).

This is a brief celebration of one of the finest works of world literature. Giving a book a designation like that might seem to condemn the “worthy but not for me” category, like one of those books in a Victorian personal library that look just fine on the bookcase in the films and somehow never leave it.

But that would be a shame, argue Xue Yi and Jeffrey Streeter, who have two very different but equally rewarding experiences of this magnificent novel, which, they believe, demands to be read by a wide audience. 

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Yi

The first time I discovered The Dream of the Red Chamber, it was in my mom’s May Seventh Cadre School dorm room, while she was tending pigs at the school’s pig farm. Mom was on her second rotation from her regular teaching job at the Conservatory of Music, mandated by the government. I must have been just about seven or eight at the time, and on summer vacation. Mom brought me along and left my younger sister home with Grandma. We shared the bottom bed of a bunk while a violin teacher whom I called “Auntie Yu” occupied the top. I discovered the book under the pillow during one of my “mandatory” nap times and Auntie Yu was sleeping above me.

While I didn’t yet recognize many Chinese characters in the book, the illustrations drawn in traditional Chinese painting style caught my eyes—those were totally different from any paintings I had seen in my young life, which were mostly depicting workers and peasants and soldiers, as Communist heroes—the illustrations of ladies in flowy dynasty-time dresses, hair decorated with delicate jewels, and living in garden pavilions. I was fascinated! It must have been the noise of me flipping through the pages that woke up Auntie Yu, she pounded the bed and shouted for me to go back to sleep: “If you don’t lie still and sleep, I am going to send you to the pigsty!”

I lay still, but instead of putting the book away, I started reading. And I was not able to stop.

It wasn’t until I was in middle school, that I completed what I consider a true read-through of all 4 volumes of The Dream of the Red Chamber set we had at home. By then, it was not just the illustrations and stories, but the poetries of natural beauty, atmospheric romance, and philosophical contemplation (风花雪夜); and the sentiments of melancholy, sorrow, and poignancy (多愁善感), that made a lasting impression on me. 

A scene from The Dream of the Red Chamber: Lin Daiyu travelling north (chapter 3).

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Jeffrey

The Dream of the Red Chamber is considered one of four representative classics of Chinese literature. Even more importantly for me (Jeffrey Streeter), it’s one of the greatest books I’ve read. It’s a story about imperial court politics, about a multi-generational extended family with a political structure all of its own, and about the beauty of the natural world. And above all, it’s a story about love. At its heart is a love triangle that many readers, including myself, find truly beguiling. Love also appears in the novel in many other guises and many kinds of relationships. This universal topic is kaleidoscoped here in huge variety and set in what even for modern Chinese readers, and especially for those of us brought up in other cultures, a very distant world, that of 18th-century China under the Qing dynasty. 

The great and enduring appeal of the story of Jia Baoyu, Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai and their wider family and associates has had to contend with a number of issues over the years. One is that the novel was unfinished at the author Cao Xueqin’s death and was finished by an unknown accomplice, probably a close collaborator or relative. And we actually know relatively little for sure of Cao Xueqin himself, though there is some reason to believe that the novel contains elements of autobiography, heavily disguised. 

A scene from The Dream of the Red Chamber: Xue Baochai chasing butterflies (chapter 27).

It also seems that the author’s family was in the process of falling from grace under the new Emperor, which is possibly the reason why the Jia family in the novel seem to feel life is so precarious and why there is an air of nostalgia that wafts through the chambers.

And then there are the different names for the book—it's gone by 5 different ones in Chinese, though 红楼梦 (The Dream of the Red Chamber) has won out. Though, in fact, it is another Chinese name, 石头记 , The Story of the Stone, that David Hawkes uses as the title for his excellent translation, whose translation to the 1973 Penguin edition I am drawing upon here and which I recommend. ¹

All this might seem enough to put you off. But this is a story that will stay with you forever. At one level, it’s a simple story of a boy who has to choose between two beautiful cousins. The simple power of this story will keep you reading. And yet it’s a story told within a complex narrative structure with psychological depth and sophisticated character development. The key themes of love, fate, family dynamics, social decline, and the ephemeral nature of wealth and prosperity are universal.

And the cultural milieu where this all plays out, while unfamiliar, is fascinating and full of beauty and poetry, as well as intriguing insights into the manners and customs of 18th-century Chinese society. The novel feels like a look back, not in anger but in mild sadness at the “faded splendour wan” (to use Milton’s phrase) of past glories. The translator David Hawkes calls the book “a sort of Remembrance of Things Past,” so if you are a Proust fan, you won’t need any further reason to read it. 

A scene from The Dream of the Red Chamber, chapter 33, in which Baoyu has just received a beating from his father.

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I read The Dream of the Red Chamber while living in Shanghai twenty years ago. And the atmosphere of the book stays with me still. As I fell into the story, I found myself caught in the same dilemma as the hero, the boy, then young man, at the heart of the story. Would he, should he, fall for the dreamy Lin Daiyu or steadfastly love the beautiful but worldly Xue Baochai? The debate has raged for centuries. According to David Hawkes, “Old gentlemen nearly came to blows in 19th-century Peking over their relative merits." 

And once, this strength of feeling actually helped me in my work as a cultural diplomat. One Saturday morning, on an official visit to an important cultural institution in the city, I chanced upon a senior official whose acquaintance I had been trying to cultivate. He spoke no English to speak of, so in the absence of an interpreter, I did my best with my halting Mandarin. Quickly running out of topics I could talk about and influenced by the cultural setting we found ourselves in, I decided to mention 红楼梦 The Dream of the Red Chamber and ask him who his favourite character was. 

He looked thoughtful, then a little serious. Had I committed a gaffe in asking?

When he spoke, it wasn’t to answer but to ask me back, “Who’s yours?” 

“Lin Daiyu,” I replied. 

He smiled.

“Mine too,” he said. 

It was not exactly a highpoint of world diplomacy or indeed like a scene out of the Netflix drama The Diplomat, but I’d made a useful connection, and I had The Dream of the Red Chamber to thank for it. 

Lin Daiyu burying flowers (scene from chapters 23 & 33) on a 1981 PRC Post stamp. Courtesy of Yi Xue

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A final thought from me (Jeffrey). I initially found the framing story a little strange and offputting. And the set-up of the book of the family involves, like a big Russian novel or One Hundred Years of Solitude, some effort to learn a number of unfamiliar names. But I urge you to persevere, as I did, into the beautiful unfolding of the narrative and walk with eyes wide open into this unfamiliar but beguiling world. Once you’ve taken the journey north with Lin Daiyu and arrived at the Jia family mansion in chapter 3, you’ll be well established in the Jia household and in the novel. You won’t want to leave.

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1. https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/STORSTONE/the-story-of-the-stone