Cao Xueqin was a great writer during the Qing Dynasty（1616-1911），and best-known as the author of“A Dream of Red Mansions，”one of the Four Great Classic Chinese Novels.
Many Chinese literature scholars believe that the novel is partly based on Cao’s personal life experiences.
Cao was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Cao’s great-grandfather, grandfather and his father were appointed in succession by the Emperor Kangxi as the Commissioner of Imperial Textile in Jiangning, stationed in today’s Nanjing, capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province. The position was deemed as a very lucrative post at that time.
Later, the family became so rich that they played host four times to the emperor during his well-recorded trips to the Yangtze River Delta areas in the south.
But the good luck of the Cao family came to an end when a new emperor came to the throne. In 1727, the family’s prop-erties were confiscated in a politically motivated purge and the whole family was forced to move to today’s Beijing.
Cao was a highly talented boy. He had received very good education during his childhood and became an excellent poet and painter as a teenager.
However, after the downfall of his family, he lived in poverty for the rest of his life in the western suburbs of Beijing.
In later years, he could hardly eke out a living by selling his paintings, but he declined the recommendation by some friends to become a painter in the imperial court.
Instead, he spent more than 10 years writing”A Dream of Red Mansions,”a work that is today regarded as the pinnacle of Chinese classical novels.
Some of his friends said that every word written by Cao in the novel was soaked with “tears and blood”and a decade’s hardship Cao had endured in writing this novel was simply “unimaginable.”
The novel tells the stories about four rich and prominent feudal families from their peak days to their decline. At theheart, there is a tragic love story about Jia Baoyu, the chief protagonist of the novel, and his younger cousin Lin Daiyu.
But the novel goes far beyond that. It also portrays a galaxy of vivid, distinctive characters, describes the debauched lives of the noble class, offers many original and beautifully written poems, and reveals the corruption, political struggles and inhumanity of the feudalistic social system. So, some scholars say this novel is a prophecy of the demise of the near-ly two-century-old feudalism in China.
Because of its sharp criticism of the feudalistic society, illustrious description of incest in the noble families and gen-erous praise of the rebellious thought and behavior of the young heroes, the novel was once banned as a”porn book”during the Qing Dynasty.
According to historical records, of the 120 chapters of the novel, Cao wrote only the first 80 and the last 40 chapters were attributed to another writer, Gao E.
After its publication, the novel was so popular that many Chinese scholars devoted their lifetime to studying Cao’s work and later they developed a so-called Redology school. Even today, there are writers who are trying to rewrite the last 40 chapters of the great novel.
