The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Cao Xueqin · a vernacular novel in chapters · Cao Xueqin’s eighty, in manuscript from the 1750s; the received text completed to one hundred and twenty by other hands and printed in 1791 · scored on the Chinese of the eighty, read from knowledge, with the translation of David Hawkes and John Minford (1973–86) beside it for sense; no text in hand, and no translation quoted
Mode
Novel of a great household as myth and elegy; family chronicle, love story and allegory of the true and the false in one fiction
Mythos
The stone left over from mending heaven; the plant that repays dew with a lifetime of tears; wood and stone against gold and jade; fate written in a register before life; the garden as paradise in time
Phase
From the stone at the foot of the peak, through the house’s height at a consort’s visit home, to the night search of the garden and the first deaths of the fall; Cao’s eighty chapters break off before the fall is enacted
Presentation
Prose fiction in the vernacular chapter form; eighty chapters, each under a couplet title, opening on the storyteller’s formula and closing on the promise of the next; verse in most of the forms of its culture set in the prose, each poem in its maker’s voice; a frame that calls its own fiction a cover for true events
Register
From Liu Laolao’s country doggerel and Xue Pan’s gross song to the burial of the flowers and the elegy for the Hibiscus Daughter; a Beijing vernacular that moves into the classical register for the frame and the elegy
Scale
Two houses of one family across three generations, several hundred named persons, and a cosmos of stone and flower
Governing Proposition
A stone left over when heaven was mended is born as a boy with jade in his mouth, and grows up among the girls of a great household in a garden built for his sister’s one night home, beside a cousin who has come into the world to repay a debt of dew with a lifetime of tears; every girl’s end is written in a register before her story is told, and the house begins to fall from within. The wager of the work is that a world made solid in every rent, feast and quarrel can be shown in the same pages to have been a dream, and that its loss is felt the more for it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“满纸荒唐言，一把辛酸泪。都云作者痴，谁解其中味？”
“Pages full of absurd words, a handful of bitter tears. All say the author is mad; who understands the taste within?” The quatrain stands in the first chapter, just after a passage that says Cao Xueqin “披阅十载，增删五次”
“read and revised it over ten years, five times added to and cut”. The novel opens by doubting itself. Its narrator says the true events have been hidden and told in the rustic words of fiction, and puts the confession into two names: Zhen Shiyin (甄士隐), which sounds as “true events hidden”, and Jia Yucun (贾雨村), which sounds as “false words”. The family at the centre of the book is the Jia, the false. Every solid thing the novel goes on to build, it has already called a cover.
Before any human appears, the frame has given the boy his nature and the girl her death. The goddess Nüwa smelts 36,501 stones to mend the sky and uses 36,500. The one left over lies at the foot of Qinggeng Peak (青埂峰), whose name puns on 情根, the root of passion. The stone comes alive, begs a Buddhist monk and a Taoist to carry it into the red dust of the world, and is shrunk into a jade. In the same chapter a divine attendant waters a crimson-pearl plant with sweet dew; when he goes down into the world she follows him, to repay the dew with the tears of a lifetime. The boy will be born with the jade in his mouth, useless for the repair of heaven and useless to every career his family wants for him. The girl will weep, and her weeping will be her debt paid out.
Then the first chapter tells the whole novel in a small household before the great one is opened. Zhen Shiyin loses his little daughter in the crowd at the Lantern Festival and his house to a fire, and a lame Taoist passes him singing: “世人都晓神仙好，惟有功名忘不了！古今将相在何方？荒冢一堆草没了。”
“All men know the immortals are blessed, but rank and fame they cannot forget. Where are the generals and ministers of old? A heap of graves, gone under the grass.” Some editions print 唯 for 惟. Zhen glosses the song, and his gloss ends: “乱烘烘你方唱罢我登场，反认他乡是故乡。甚荒唐，到头来都是为他人作嫁衣裳！”
“In the uproar, you finish your song and I take the stage, mistaking a strange land for home. How absurd: in the end all of it is sewing wedding clothes for another.” He walks away with the Taoist.
Movement II
The second chapter surveys the two Jia houses, Rongguo and Ningguo, through a dealer’s gossip, and reports the strangest thing in them: a boy born with a jade in his mouth, who says as a child that girls are made of water and men of mud. In the third, Lin Daiyu, orphaned, comes into the Rongguo house, and a voice breaks in before its owner is seen: “我来迟了，不曾迎接远客！”
“I’m late, and missed welcoming our guest from afar!” It is Wang Xifeng, brilliant and rapacious, who manages the house. Then Baoyu comes in, looks at his cousin and says: “这个妹妹我曾见过的”
“I have seen this cousin before.” The plant and the stone have met, and the meeting is played as a drawing-room moment.
The fourth chapter turns to the state. Jia Yucun, the man of false words, is now a magistrate, and a case comes before him: the heir of the Xue family has killed a man. A servant shows him the officials’ protective charm, the list of families no magistrate may touch, and Yucun lets the heir go free. In the fifth, Baoyu is taken to rest in the room of his nephew’s wife, Qin Keqing. He has refused another room because a couplet hangs in it, “世事洞明皆学问，人情练达即文章”
“To see through the world’s affairs is learning; to be practised in human feeling is literature”, and he will not sleep under a lesson in getting on. Asleep in hers, he dreams himself to the realm of the Great Void, through an archway inscribed: “假作真时真亦假，无为有处有还无”
“When the false is taken for true, the true becomes false; where nothing is taken for something, something becomes nothing.”
The fairy Jinghuan, whose name warns against illusion, shows him the registers of the Twelve Hairpins of Jinling, a picture and a poem for each girl’s fate, and has her singers perform the twelve songs of A Dream of the Red Chamber. The novel’s end is told here, in riddles he does not understand. Of Tanchun: “才自精明志自高，生于末世运偏消”
“Clever and high of purpose, born in a declining age, her luck ebbs.” Of Xifeng: “机关算尽太聪明，反算了卿卿性命”
“Too clever, all schemes reckoned out, she reckoned away her own life.” And of the bond he does not yet know he is in: “都道是金玉良姻，俺只念木石前盟”
“All speak of the good match of gold and jade; I think only of the old bond of wood and stone.” The gold is Baochai’s locket, inscribed to pair with his jade; the wood is Daiyu, the plant. The last song ends the whole: “好一似食尽鸟投林，落了片白茫茫大地真干净！”
“Like birds that have eaten all and fly to the wood: what is left is a vast white land, truly clean.” He is married in the dream to a fairy who has both cousins’ beauty, and wakes on the brink of a ford.
Movement III
The first great death in the book says what the house will come to. Qin Keqing sickens, and before her death she comes to Xifeng in a dream to warn her: “月满则亏，水满则溢”
“The moon wanes when it is full; water spills when it brims.” And she gives the proverb of the end: “树倒猢狲散”
“When the tree falls, the monkeys scatter.” Xifeng takes over the funeral of the Ningguo house, and in a temple on the way she takes three thousand taels to break a betrothal; two deaths follow (ch. 15). The warning and the bribe stand a few pages apart. The household is told how it will fall in the same chapters that show it falling.
Then the house reaches its height. Baoyu’s elder sister Yuanchun is made an imperial consort (ch. 16), and the family builds a garden for her single visit home: the Daguan Garden (大观园). Baoyu, tested by his father, names its pavilions and prospects (ch. 17). The visit is the grandest night in the book, and the consort weeps through it (ch. 18). Afterwards she lets Baoyu and the girls live in the garden. He and Daiyu read The Western Chamber together; later, passing the actresses at rehearsal, she hears lines of The Peony Pavilion and is overcome (ch. 23). A love that cannot speak of itself learns its words from plays.
In the twenty-seventh chapter Daiyu gathers the fallen petals and buries them, and sings over the grave: “花谢花飞花满天，红消香断有谁怜？”
“Flowers fade, flowers fly, flowers fill the sky; red gone, scent spent, who pities them?” “一年三百六十日，风刀霜剑严相逼。”
“Three hundred and sixty days a year, the knife of wind and the sword of frost press hard.” “侬今葬花人笑痴，他年葬侬知是谁？”
“I bury the flowers now, and people laugh at my folly; who will bury me, another year?” “一朝春尽红颜老，花落人亡两不知！”
“One morning spring is spent and beauty old; the flowers fall, the girl is gone, and neither knows.” Baoyu, on the hillside, hears it and falls to the ground. The girl buries the flowers as the book will bury the girls, and her song is the fifth chapter’s prophecy made lyric. A few chapters on, Baoyu is beaten by his father, after a maid’s suicide and a prince’s complaint over the actor Jiang Yuhan (ch. 32, 33), and he sends Daiyu two old handkerchiefs, on which she writes three quatrains (ch. 34).
Movement IV
“女儿是水作的骨肉，男人是泥作的骨肉”
“Girls are made of water, men of mud.” The boy’s saying, reported in the second chapter, is the law of the garden years. The girls found poetry clubs and judge each other’s verses on begonia, chrysanthemum and crab (ch. 37, 38). Xiangling learns to write poetry (ch. 48). There are snow and red plum (ch. 49, 50), Xiangyun asleep drunk among peony petals (ch. 62), and a night feast in Baoyu’s court where each girl draws a flower lot that foretells her fate (ch. 63). Every poem is written in the voice of its maker, Daiyu’s, Baochai’s and Xiangyun’s each in its own temper, and some are meant to be bad. The verse is how the novel judges its people.
The garden is seen from below as well. Liu Laolao, a poor countrywoman with a distant connection, comes begging in the sixth chapter, and on her second visit the household makes her its jester. At the feast she plays the clown on cue: “老刘，老刘，食量大似牛，吃一个老母猪不抬头”
“Old Liu, old Liu, eats more than an ox; she will eat a whole old sow and not lift her head” (ch. 40). Before the visit is over she has fallen asleep in Baoyu’s own bed (ch. 41). The maids are rendered with the mistresses. Yuanyang refuses to become the concubine of the master Jia She and vows never to marry (ch. 46). Qingwen, sick with fever, mends Baoyu’s peacock cloak through the night (ch. 52).
And the garden costs money. At the New Year a steward brings the rents from an estate, short, and the ancestral sacrifice is made at Ningguo (ch. 53); Grandmother Jia mocks the plots of the scholar-and-beauty romances (ch. 54). Xifeng lends out the servants’ monthly silver at interest. Tanchun, a concubine’s daughter, takes charge of the house and reforms its waste, putting the garden out to the servants to farm (ch. 55, 56), and the household’s sentiment wears her reforms down. Her register has already said it: born in a declining age, her luck ebbs. The house rots in the sister mansion too: You Sanjie cuts her throat with the sword of the man who has rejected her (ch. 66), and her sister You Erjie, Jia Lian’s secret second wife, is driven by Xifeng’s contriving to swallow gold (ch. 69). In the garden the girls fly kites (ch. 70).
Movement V
The turn comes from inside. After Grandmother Jia’s eightieth birthday an embroidered pouch with an erotic picture is found in the garden (ch. 73), and the garden is searched at night (ch. 74). Tanchun slaps the searching servant, and says that a great house is never destroyed from outside first, but from within. Xichun breaks with Ningguo. At the Mid-Autumn feast a sigh is heard from the ancestral hall (ch. 75). By the pond Daiyu and Xiangyun make linked verse, and it ends: “寒塘渡鹤影，冷月葬花魂”
“Over the cold pond a crane’s shadow crosses; the chill moon buries the flower’s soul” (ch. 76). Some manuscripts read 诗魂, the poet’s soul, for 花魂.
Qingwen, slandered, is expelled from the garden sick. Her register had read: “霁月难逢，彩云易散。心比天高，身为下贱。”
“A clear moon is rarely met, bright clouds soon scatter; her heart higher than heaven, her station base.” Baoyu finds her in her cousin’s hovel; she bites off her long nails to give him, they exchange undershirts, and she dies (ch. 77). He writes an elegy for her as the Hibiscus Daughter, and, revising its lines in Daiyu’s hearing, makes them: “茜纱窗下，我本无缘；黄土垄中，卿何薄命”
“Beneath the gauze window I had no fate with you; in the yellow earth, how thin your fortune” (ch. 78). Daiyu hears them as hers. Yingchun is married to a brute (ch. 79); Xue Pan’s new wife torments Xiangling; Baoyu asks a quack at a temple for a cure for jealousy, and the eighty chapters end on his joke (ch. 80).
There Cao’s hand stops. The commentary of his circle records his death: “壬午除夕，书未成，芹为泪尽而逝”
“On the last night of renwu, the book unfinished, Qin (Xueqin), his tears spent, died”, which falls in February 1763; some scholars put it a year later. The same commentators knew later chapters that are not the printed ones: a fall more complete, Baoyu in poverty, a visit to him in a prison temple, Xiren providing for him and Baochai, Daiyu dead before his marriage, and his letting go at the cliff’s edge; some, they say, were lent out and lost. In 1791 Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E printed the novel in a hundred and twenty chapters, the last forty by a hand still disputed, and gave the house its fortunes back. What Cao left is the ending he told at the beginning, in the fifth chapter, to a boy who did not understand it: a vast white land, truly clean.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not a cost; the question is whether the parts are required. The argument of the eighty chapters is the life of a household in the season before its fall, and the plenitude is that argument: the birthdays, feasts, prescriptions, rents and quarrels over a funeral allowance are what will be lost, and the fifth chapter has already said so. Episodes that look detachable bear weight: Jia Rui’s death by the mirror (ch. 11, 12), the You sisters (ch. 66, 69), Liu Laolao’s outside eye. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is matter the novel could lose, about a tenth of the eighty: drinking games quoted whole (ch. 40, 62, 63), poetry sessions that repeat one pattern of composition, ranking and teasing, and the servants’ quarrels of ch. 58–61, all of one shape.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A family spends its young: the garden is a brief enclosure for girls between childhood and marriage, death or servitude, and the registers name each exit. Yingchun is married off to settle a debt (ch. 79), Jinchuan drowns herself over a word (ch. 32), Qingwen dies of slander (ch. 77). The maids’ lives are rendered with the mistresses’. The economy of decline is exact: Xifeng lends the servants’ monthly silver at interest, the rents fall short (ch. 53), and Tanchun’s reforms lose to the household’s sentiment (ch. 55, 56). Baoyu mocks the maxim of the career, “文死谏，武死战”
“the civil official dies remonstrating, the soldier dies in battle” (ch. 36). Held below the top because part of the wisdom is the frame’s commonplace, the vanity of the world said rather than shown.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The heights are lyrical and elegiac, and in the garden chapters they come often: Daiyu burying the fallen flowers and singing over them, and Baoyu, hearing her on the hillside, falling to the ground (ch. 27); Yuanchun’s visit home, the house at its grandest and the consort in tears (ch. 18); Qingwen mending the peacock cloak through the night (ch. 52), and Qingwen dying (ch. 77); Xiangyun asleep drunk among peony petals (ch. 62); at the Mid-Autumn feast a sigh from the ancestral hall, and by the pond a linked verse that ends on the chill moon burying the flower’s soul (ch. 75, 76). Held below the top because long stretches are social texture rather than elevation, by design, and the scenes the novel is best remembered by, Daiyu burning her poems and Baoyu’s bow in the snow, are the completion’s and are not counted.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The goddess Nüwa smelts 36,501 stones to mend the sky and uses all but one; the stone left over becomes the jade in Baoyu’s mouth, so the boy is the useless remainder of a cosmic repair, and his uselessness to the world of office is the myth enacted. A crimson-pearl plant, watered with sweet dew, follows into the world to repay it with a lifetime’s tears, so Daiyu’s weeping and her death are one fact at two levels. The love story is the myth’s structure: “都道是金玉良姻，俺只念木石前盟”
“all speak of the good match of gold and jade; I think only of the old bond of wood and stone” (ch. 5). Held a shade from the top because in the middle chapters the two levels sometimes run beside each other rather than through each other.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The inheritance is the vernacular chapter-novel: the storyteller’s formulas and couplet titles, the household novel of Jin Ping Mei, the scholar-and-beauty romance, and the dream narrative from the Tang tales to Tang Xianzu’s plays. The turn: a novel that makes the reader’s belief its subject; a household turned from appetite to consciousness, with the girls at the centre of value; the stock romance mocked inside the text, by the stone (ch. 1) and by Grandmother Jia (ch. 54); the lyric taken into the novel, each poem a character’s. The stake was real: a family ruined in the confiscation of 1728, and a book revised over a decade in poverty in the Western Hills, “披阅十载，增删五次”
“read and revised over ten years, five times added to and cut” (ch. 1), never printed in its author’s life. Held from the top by Jin Ping Mei, which had already made a household a novel’s world.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the novel loses what it knows. The fifth chapter gives every girl’s end before her story is told, so the whole is read as a remembering of what is already lost. One register poem holds two cousins: “玉带林中挂，金簪雪里埋”
“a jade belt hangs in the wood; a gold hairpin is buried in the snow”, the names of Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai hidden in its lines. The doubles carry the knowledge: Zhen and Jia, true and false; the two houses; the elegy for Qingwen, revised in Daiyu’s hearing and heard as hers (ch. 78). The setting has a plot: the garden is built, lived in, searched and emptied. Verse is characterisation, so the form judges its speakers. Held below the top because Cao’s form is not closed: the fall is foretold and begun (ch. 74–80), not enacted.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a discipline named for the book, Hongxue, Redology. The readings have not converged: Wang Guowei’s essay of 1904, a tragedy of desire read through Schopenhauer; Cai Yuanpei’s decoding of 1917, Ming loyalist allegory; Hu Shi (1921) and Yu Pingbo (1923), autobiography and the question of the last forty chapters; the campaign of 1954 against Yu, which made the novel’s reading a matter of state; a century of manuscript scholarship. Lu Xun put the well in one sentence: “经学家看见《易》，道学家看见淫，才子看见缠绵，革命家看见排满，流言家看见宫闱秘事”
“the classicist sees the Book of Changes, the moralist sees lust, the man of feeling sees tender love, the revolutionary sees anti-Manchu protest, the gossip sees palace secrets.” Held a tenth below the top because much of Redology works the author’s life and the text’s history rather than the work’s meaning.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The field is the work’s own tradition, Chinese literature, and East Asia. The force: it reorganised what Chinese fiction could be, a novel of consciousness and of a household’s whole life, with the lyric inside it and its own fictionality as its subject. Lu Xun said so in his lectures of 1924: “自有《红楼梦》出来以后，传统的思想和写法都打破了”
“since the Red Chamber appeared, the traditional ways of thought and of writing have all been broken.” Reach stands below force: three decades in manuscript among a small readership, and a popular image of the novel that rests partly on its completion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: dozens of sequels within decades of the print; the late Qing novels of the courtesan world; Ba Jin’s Family (1933); Eileen Chang, who wrote a book on its text; Bai Xianyong; the Yue opera (1958) and the television series of 1987.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, in that order. The form survives legible: the frame, the registers, the garden’s rise and the turn of ch. 74–80. What is lost is the fall in Cao’s hand. The commentary of his own circle refers to later chapters unlike the printed ones, says some were lent out and lost, and records his death with the book unfinished. That is the heavy charge. The completion by other hands, printed in 1791, is how nearly every reader has met the work; it gave the novel a presence no manuscript could, and it overlaid Cao’s design with a household restored and Daiyu’s death moved to the wedding night. Weighed both ways, it is a net credit to survival. Presence since the 1790s is unbroken. The eighty themselves are unstable: rival manuscripts, two chapters disputed, ch. 22 unfinished.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Cao’s Chinese, so far as it can be judged from knowledge. Each voice is its own. Xifeng is heard before she is seen: “我来迟了，不曾迎接远客！”
“I’m late, and missed welcoming our guest from afar!” (ch. 3). Baochai turns the sad theme of the willow catkin upward, “好风凭借力，送我上青云”
“a good wind, lend me your strength, to send me up to the blue clouds” (ch. 70), and Xue Pan’s song is meant to be gross, and is. A Beijing vernacular moves into the classical register for the frame and the elegy without a seam; hundreds of persons are kept distinct, and threads are laid chapters ahead. Charged a tenth: the eighty stand unrevised in places, ch. 22 unfinished and seams left at Qin Keqing’s death. The tonal music of the verse is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 9.5 / 10
One law governs the whole: form is emptiness and emptiness form, the true is false, the dream is a dream. The Taoist Kongkong states it in changing his name: “因空见色，由色生情，传情入色，自色悟空”
“from emptiness he saw form; from form, passion arose; passion was conveyed into form; from form he woke to emptiness” (ch. 1). The two most distant elements, Nüwa’s stone at the foot of the peak and Xifeng’s usury with the maids’ wages, obey it: the realism makes the world solid enough that its loss is felt, and the frame says it was never solid. Liu Laolao’s farce and Qingwen’s death sit in one physics. Breaches lower it: the novel’s calendar does not cohere and the young people’s ages drift, and Qin Keqing’s death leaves the household’s suspicion and Baoyu’s spitting blood without a cause.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Many orders, and the household integrates them. The state: a consort at court, the magistrate’s list of families no case may touch (ch. 4), Jia Yucun’s career. The economy: rents, usury, the garden farmed out, funeral allowances. The family: three generations, two houses, legitimate and concubine lines, Tanchun against her own mother. Class and labour: maids, stewards, actresses, the country poor in Liu Laolao. The sacred: Buddhist and Taoist in the frame, nuns, Jia Jing’s fatal elixirs. The arts: poetry, painting, theatre, the garden itself. The body, medicine and desire, desire between men included. Consciousness, in the analysis of the lovers’ quarrel (ch. 29). The cosmic, in the stone and the registers. Held under the top because war, and the field labour that pays the rents, are seen only at the edges, and consciousness is shown more in speech and gesture than in sustained interior.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 9.6. A myth of the stone left over and the debt of tears built into the love story and the structure; a discipline named for the book, whose readings have not converged in two centuries; a reorganisation of what Chinese fiction could be; and the state, the economy, the family, the servants, the sacred and the cosmos held in one household.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.4, held by the matter the eighty chapters could lose, about a tenth of them: drinking games quoted whole, poetry sessions that repeat one pattern of composition, ranking and teasing, and servants’ quarrels of one shape. The plenitude is the argument, and the repetition within it is still repetition. Next above it, The Imperishable at 9.0: the fall in Cao’s hand is lost, and for two centuries the ending most readers have known has been another’s.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.6, Pressure on Tradition at 9.6, The Unconcealment at 9.5, The Swerve at 9.3 and The Imperishable at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, The Imperishable by five tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.6. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Hongloumeng (红楼梦), known in manuscript as Shitou ji (石头记), the Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin, scored as his own work: the eighty chapters, with the frame and the design they lay down, in the Chinese of the manuscripts that carry the commentary of Zhiyan zhai (脂砚斋). No autograph survives. The oldest manuscripts include the Jiaxu, dated by its title to 1754, of which sixteen chapters survive, and the Gengchen of 1760, which holds seventy-eight of the eighty; the modern critical editions take the Gengchen as their base. Chapters 64 and 67 are supplied from other manuscripts, their authorship is disputed, and no score rests on them; chapter 22 breaks off before its end. The received text of a hundred and twenty chapters was printed by Cheng Weiyuan (程伟元) and Gao E (高鹗) in the winter of 1791 and revised in 1792, some twenty-eight years after Cao’s death; the hand that wrote its last forty chapters is disputed, the commentary written in Cao’s lifetime describes an ending they do not have, and they are weighed only as a change to what survives of the work, neither credited nor charged on any other axis. No Chinese text or translation was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on the work in Chinese. Chinese is quoted only where its words are certain, in the simplified characters of the modern editions, with the desk’s own literal English beneath and known variants noted; everything else is paraphrased without quotation marks. Translations · The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes and John Minford, five volumes (1973–86), is read beside the Chinese as the best English work of the novel: complete, every poem rendered as verse, the puns carried, and the registers of speech kept distinct. Hawkes translated the first eighty chapters in three volumes and Minford the last forty in two, so the translators divide where the authorship does. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s A Dream of Red Mansions (1978–80), complete, plainer and closer to the Chinese line, serves for close sense. The earlier English versions, partial or abridged, are not adequate to the work. No translation is quoted, and no translator’s shortfall is charged to the novel. The whole of Cao’s Chinese read in order, the fine grain of his Beijing vernacular as the eighteenth century heard it, and the tonal music of the regulated verse are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. The length in characters and the counts of persons and poems are not given. Citations are by chapter of the standard edition.