Dream of the Red Chamber

Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, was written by Cao Xueqin in Qing-dynasty China. He began it in the 1740s and worked on it until his death in 1763 or 1764, leaving it unfinished; manuscript copies of eighty chapters first circulated among his friends as The Story of the Stone. In 1791–92 Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E edited the first printed editions, with forty more chapters, under the title Dream of the Red Chamber, and this 120-chapter version became the most widely read; whether the last forty chapters are Cao’s own is still debated. The novel records daily life in the two houses of the aristocratic Jia clan, the Rongguo and Ningguo Houses, and through the loves, marriages and fates of Jia Baoyu, Lin Daiyu, Xue Baochai and others it traces a great family’s passage from splendour to decline, observing the lifestyles and aesthetics of the High Qing along the way. The field of study devoted to the novel is called Redology. The National Palace Museum’s exhibition The Splendor of Dream of the Red Chamber notes that Cao was born into the family that held the imperial textile commission in Jiangning, and that the wealth in the book comes from his own experience; it reads the novel through objects from the museum, the National Central Library and the National Taiwan University Library.

Look first at what an object is made of and how it was made, then read the label to see which character or episode of the novel it is tied to.