Why Is Dream of the Red Chamber China's Greatest Novel? Plot, Ending and the Mystery of the Last 40 Chapters

Dream of the Red Chamber is an 18th-century Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin about the rise and decline of a great aristocratic family, the Jia clan, told through the love and rivalry of three young cousins: the heir Jia Baoyu, the sickly poet Lin Daiyu, and the graceful Xue Baochai. It is considered one of the Four Great Classic Novels of Chinese literature and is admired for its psychological depth and its detailed picture of life in High Qing China. It even has its own academic field, called Redology. What makes it unusual is that its author died before finishing it, and nobody is completely sure who wrote the ending most people read.

A stone that wanted to see the world

The novel opens with a frame story. Long ago, the goddess Nüwa mended the sky, and one stone was left over. This conscious Stone longs to experience the "red dust", the ordinary human world, and begs a Taoist priest and a Buddhist monk to take it along. It enters the mortal realm, and in the most common versions it is reborn as Jia Baoyu, whose name means "Precious Jade". That is why the book is also called The Story of the Stone.

Baoyu is born with a piece of glowing jade in his mouth. He is about twelve or thirteen when we meet him: sensitive, intelligent, and frowned on by his strict Confucian father, because he secretly reads the Daoist classic Zhuangzi and romantic plays instead of the books needed for the civil service examinations.

The Jia family and the Garden

The story follows the two branches of the wealthy Jia clan, the Rongguo and Ningguo Houses, which live in neighbouring compounds in an unnamed capital. When one of the Jia daughters becomes an imperial consort, the family builds a lavish landscaped garden, the Daguanyuan, to receive her, and much of the novel's action takes place there.

The scale is enormous. The book follows around thirty main characters and more than four hundred minor ones as the family slides from the height of its prestige. The great writer Lu Xun said the novel broke with every traditional technique of Chinese fiction, because its characters are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but feel like real people.

Baoyu, Daiyu and Baochai

At the heart of the story is a love triangle that is really a story about fate. Lin Daiyu is Baoyu's younger cousin and his true love: beautiful, sentimental, sharp-tongued, a gifted poet, often jealous, and suffering from a lung illness. In the frame story, Baoyu in a former life watered a fairy plant that became Daiyu, and she is born into the human world to repay him with her tears.

Xue Baochai, his other cousin, is her opposite: worldly, tactful, and a model of the ideal young woman of her time. She wears a golden locket whose inscription seems to match the words on Baoyu's jade, and their marriage is presented as predestined. Baoyu shares Daiyu's love of music and poetry, but he is meant to marry Baochai, with whom he has no emotional bond. That tension, set against the family's decline, drives the book.

Other characters are just as memorable. Wang Xifeng, Baoyu's clever, funny and sometimes cruel cousin-in-law, runs the daily business of the household and holds real economic and political power in the family.

How does Dream of the Red Chamber end?

The first eighty chapters are full of prophecies and foreshadowing. It is clear that Lin Daiyu will die, that Baoyu and Baochai will marry, and that Baoyu will become a monk. The marriage to Baochai finally fails because Baoyu's love for Daiyu continues after her death. Near the end, the young Jia Lan succeeds in the imperial examinations, bringing some credit back to the family.

Readers who want a cheerful ending will not find one. The novel is, in the end, a farewell: the author meant it as a memorial to the women he had known in his youth, friends, relatives and servants.

Who wrote the last 40 chapters?

Cao Xueqin began the novel in the 1740s and worked on it until his death in 1763 or 1764. By then, the first eighty chapters were complete and circulating in hand-copied manuscripts under the title The Story of the Stone. These copies passed among friends and then sold for large sums on the open market.

In 1791, Gao E and Cheng Weiyuan published the first printed edition, which completed the story in 120 chapters by adding forty new ones. Their version became the most widely read. Ever since, scholars have argued about those last forty chapters. Hu Shih argued in 1921 that Gao E wrote them, but a 120-chapter manuscript discovered in the mid-20th century complicated the question. A 2014 study using statistical analysis of writing style found strong evidence that the first eighty and last forty chapters were written by two different authors. So the answer is still: probably not Cao, possibly not Gao, and the debate continues.

Why it matters for the Chinese language

The novel is written in vernacular Chinese rather than Classical Chinese, and its dialogue is in the Beijing Mandarin that later became the basis of modern spoken Chinese. In the early 20th century, dictionary makers used it to build the vocabulary of the new standard language. The young Mao Zedong claimed to have read it five times. For a learner, that makes it more than a classic: it is one of the books that shaped the language itself.

Learn with Dream of the Red Chamber: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
star-crossed lovers	lovers kept apart by fate	Baoyu and Daiyu are star-crossed lovers.
the rise and fall	the success and later decline of something	The book tells the rise and fall of a family.
a love triangle	three people caught in romantic tension	The story centres on a love triangle.
to come to nothing	to fail completely	All their plans came to nothing.
to read between the lines	to find hidden meaning	Readers must read between the lines.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a family story you know, using "the rise and fall" and "to come to nothing".