"The author was of a very wealthy and over-refined family that fell into poverty in a very short time. Ts'ao-chan took to drinking and died young. In his book he describes the glory of bygone days. We see how Chia Pao-yu grows up in the midst of the girls of the family, which brings about a great number of love-tangles and tragedies. The most pathetic is Pao-yu's love for Lin Tai-yu who dies of love-sickness after Pao-yu's parents have tricked him into a marriage with another girl. Pao-yu leaves home and meets his father when, many years later, he has died to the world and became a monk."
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Richard Wilhelm, Die Chinesische Literatur ['Chinese Literature'], as quoted in Joseph Schyns's One Thousand Five Hundred Modern Chinese Novels & Plays (Peking, 1948), p. 371
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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