红楼梦简介 英文版

"The Story of the Stone" redirects here. For Barry Hughart's fantasy novel on ancient China, see The Story of the Stone (Barry Hughart).
For other uses, see Dream of the Red Chamber (disambiguation).
Dream of the Red Chamber (also Red Chamber Dream, Hung Lou Meng or A Dream of Red Mansions) (simplified Chinese: 红楼梦; traditional Chinese: 红楼梦; pinyin: Hónglóu mèng), rarely also called The Story of the Stone (simplified Chinese: 石头记; traditional Chinese: 石头记; pinyin: Shítóu jì; literally "Record of the Stone"), is a masterpiece of Chinese vernacular literature and one of China's Four Great Classical Novels. The novel was composed some time in the middle of the 18th century during the Qing Dynasty and is attributed to Cao Xueqin. "Redology" is the field of study devoted exclusively to this work, and the novel is generally acknowledged to be the pinnacle of classical Chinese novels
The novel is believed to be semi-autobiographical, mirroring the fortunes of Cao's own family. As the author details in the first chapter, it is intended to be a memorial to the women he knew in his youth: friends, relatives and servants.
The novel is remarkable not only for its huge cast of characters and psychological scope, but also for its precise and detailed observation of the life and social structures typical of 18th-century Chinese aristocracy.
This novel was published anonymously, but 20th-century Redologists have ascertained its author to be Cao Xueqin, based on circulated commentaries penned in red ink on many of the early handcopied versions known as the "Rouge Versions" (脂本).
The novel is written in vernacular rather than classical Chinese and helped establish the legitimacy of the vernacular idiom. Its author, Cao Xueqin, was well versed in Chinese poetry and in classical Chinese, having written tracts in the erudite semi-wenyan style. The novel's conversations are written in the Beijing Mandarin dialect, which was to become the basis of modern spoken Chinese, with influences from Nanjing-area Mandarin (where Cao's family lived in the early 1700s).