Wong (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), pp. Chan Sin-wai, Tao Tao Liu and Laurence K.

David Hawkes, in an interview conducted by Connie Chan in Oxford (7 December 1998), as quoted in Style, Wit and Word-Play, ed.

You'd make jolly well sure that they didn't occur.

If you're just making something up, forging something, you wouldn't be bothered about trying to reconcile inconsistencies. I think he tried to alter things occasionally to square one thing with another. Gao E is trying I think just to reconcile – he's not altering, I think he doesn't feel he can alter what's been found.

It seems to me ridiculous to try to believe that Gao E sat down and wrote the last 40 chapters.

Preface (dated 27 December 1791) to the first Cheng-Gao edition of Dream of the Red Chamber, as translated by John Minford in The Story of the Stone: The Debt of Tears (Penguin, 1979), Appendix I, p.

As you are at a bit of a loose end, and in need of a restorative, will you share the labour with me?'Īlthough it was only a novel, the book contained nothing contrary to the tenets of Confucian teaching, and so I gladly accepted, and fell upon the task with the eagerness of the Persian slave when he saw his pearl! Now that the work is done, I have described these circumstances for the reader's information. Bit by bit I have pieced it together, with a view to publishing it for fellow-lovers of the novel. 'This,' he said, 'is the fruit of my labours over several years. In the spring of this year, my friend Cheng Weiyuan came to see me and showed me the complete text that he had purchased.

Reading it (in this incomplete state) was indeed a tantalizing experience. I was once lucky enough to borrow a copy from a friend.

It is over twenty years since I first heard of Hong-lou meng and the great fascination it holds for its readers (despite the fact that there has never been a complete or definitive text).

(China, Literature, Dream, Red Mansions, Red Chamber, Story Stone) Size: 8vo - over 7¾' - 9¾' tall.Gao E (Chinese: 高鶚 c. Hong Lou Meng, sometimes entitled The Dream of the Red Chamber, and sometimes The Story of the Stone, an 18th centuy classic of Chinese literature, the family saga and social panorama of the Ch'ing dynasy, is most famous for its depiction of the elaborate and beautiful classical Chinese garden created within its pages, whose (putative) original may still be seen in Beijing. And in its own cardboard slipcase, with brown titles and decoration to spine.

Glossy pictorial jacket, Chinese garden painting wraparound illustration. Pale green and gilt epp, red silk marker, blue tops.

Black papercovered boards, black linen spine with red and gilt decoration, title on front in white characters. Vol.2 only of the 3-volume unabridged edition.

Tsao hsueh chin