"HUNG-LOU-MÊNG: 紅樓夢. A famous Chinese novel in the Peking dialect, popularly known as the Dream of the Red Chamber, dealing chiefly with events of domestic life which are very graphically described, and attributed to Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in of the 17th cent. Many Chinese are said to have died for love of the heroine, Miss Lin, so exquisitely has that young lady been portrayed by the author; but the book being considered a dangerous one to fall into the hands of youth was accordingly placed in the Index Expurgatorius of China [...]. The title should properly be "The Dream of the Red-storeyed Mansion," the allusion being to the wealthy establishment at which the scene of the story is laid, and to the pomp and power of its inmates, destined by the inevitable turn of Fortune's wheel to lapse into poverty and decay."
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Herbert Giles, A Glossary of Reference on Subjects Connected with the Far East (1900), pp. 128–129
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber
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Dream of the Red Chamber
Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦 Honglou Meng), also called The Story of the Stone (石头记 Shitou Ji), composed by Cao Xueqin, is one of China's Four Great Classical Novels. It was written sometime in the middle of the 18th century during the Qing Dynasty. Long considered a masterpiece of Chinese literature, the novel is generally acknowledged to be the pinnacle of Chinese fiction.
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