1. Why I Picked It Up
This July, on a long train ride, I finished “The Song of the Burial of Flowers” and felt a pressure in my chest. I flipped back at random and landed on Chapter Five. That flip hit me like a knock — the verdict poems had already written everyone’s ending. Daiyu is “jade belt hung in the woods”, Baochai is “gold hairpin buried in snow”, Wang Xifeng is “weeping toward Jinling, her fate more bitter still”. Everything after Chapter Five is only a performance whose answer was announced beforehand.
Only then did I understand why my earlier readings always fell a little short: I had been chasing “what happens next”, but Cao Xueqin never meant “next” to be suspense. The real suspense is not the ending — it is how a person lives once they know the ending.
So this rereading, I watched only two threads: how the verdict poems and the songs fix the ending in advance, and the question of editions — in the 120 chapters we read, which are Cao Xueqin’s and which are not.
2. The Skeleton First
The Dream of the Red Chamber we have runs 120 chapters. The first 80 are generally accepted as Cao Xueqin’s own; the authorship of the last 40 is still disputed — one view says Gao E continued it, another says the continuer is unknown and Gao E only edited it1.
Its earlier form was not a printed edition but a hand-copied manuscript: 80 chapters, titled The Story of the Stone as Re-evaluated by Red Inkstone, with commentary from one or several people in the know woven into the text, commonly called “Red Inkstone commentary”. Now and then the commentary leaks a later plot point that does not match the last 40 chapters we have — which is exactly the crux of the edition problem2.
Three maps, set out first:
| Layer | What is there | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | First 80 chapters (manuscript) + last 40 (continuation) | Do not treat the last 40 as the same pen; the tone and endings both differ |
| Foreshadowing | Chapter Five’s verdict poems, songs, riddles, drinking-game verses | The whole book is a hidden thread; the ending is written in the dark |
| Figures | Jia Baoyu and the twelve beauties of Jinling | The poems give a group’s fate, not one person’s biography |
Expand: verdict poems, songs, and two families of editions
- The verdict poems are in Chapter Five: the main, secondary, and tertiary registers of the twelve Jinling beauties, a few lines each, part riddle and part sentence. Daiyu and Baochai share one poem — their fates laid side by side.
- The Dream of the Red Chamber songs are the twelve pieces in the same chapter, running from “A Life Misspent” to “Each Bird Flies to the Wood”, in effect performing the whole book in advance.
- The Red Inkstone manuscripts (the manuscript line): 80 chapters with commentary, letting you glimpse some of Cao Xueqin’s intended directions (in places different from what we now read).
- The Cheng–Gao printed text (the printed line): 120 chapters, issued around 1791 by Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E, the last 40 completing the story and rewriting many a fate. Read the two lines against each other and one thing stands out: the “Dream of the Red Chamber” we know is a tidied-up version.
3. Passages and Marginalia
On “opening”: the author writes his own verdict first
满纸荒唐言，一把辛酸泪。都云作者痴，谁解其中味？
— Chapter 1
My own working translation: Pages of idle nonsense, a handful of bitter tears. All say the author is a fool — who understands what he meant?
The book’s first poem, written over an author who “read it ten years, revised it five times”. He calls what he wrote “idle nonsense”, then calls it “bitter tears” — mocking himself on one side, refusing to explain on the other.
笔记My note: these four lines are the book’s attitude. The author knew he would be misread, so he simply put “who understands what he meant?” on the first page. The pain of reading the Dream is here too: everyone thinks they understand, and the author has already said no one does.
On “the verdict”: the ending is not suspense, it is sentence
可叹停机德，堪怜咏絮才。玉带林中挂，金簪雪里埋。
— Chapter 5, verdict poem of the twelve Jinling beauties
My own working translation: Lamentable, her virtue like the wife who stopped the loom; pitiable, her talent like the one praised for willow catkins. A jade belt hangs in the woods; a gold hairpin is buried in the snow.
Daiyu and Baochai share one poem; Cao Xueqin gives “virtue” to Baochai, “talent” to Daiyu, sighs once over each, then buries them in fate with two images. “Jade belt” hung in the woods is Lin; “gold hairpin” buried in snow is Xue — both “hung up”, both “buried”.
My note: the poem reads like a riddle because Cao Xueqin will not say it plainly. But the plainer he refuses to be, the crueller it is — he makes the reader watch a thing that must break, break slowly.
On “true and false”: one couplet, the whole book’s frame
假作真时真亦假，无为有处有还无。
— the couplet on the archway of the Great Void Illusion
My own working translation: When the false is taken as true, the true becomes false too; where non-being becomes being, being turns back to non-being.
These fourteen characters are the threshold of the Illusion, and the book’s whole worldview. The two surnames Zhen (“true”) and Jia (“false”) are themselves a gloss on this couplet; even the names carry it out.
My note: setting “true and false” at the gate tells the reader not to look here for a documentary record. What Cao Xueqin wants is not “this really happened”, but “true to the extreme becomes false, false to the extreme becomes true again” — the best posture for reading it is neither to insist on fact nor to dismiss it as fiction.
On “burying flowers”: a person mourning herself
侬今葬花人笑痴，他年葬侬知是谁？
— Chapter 27, “The Song of the Burial of Flowers”
My own working translation: I bury the flowers today and they laugh at my folly; in some later year, who will be there to bury me?
“The Song of the Burial of Flowers” is Daiyu’s own verdict poem, and the book’s shortest elegy. She is burying flowers, yet what she asks is “who will bury me”.
My note: this passage shows Daiyu’s character most, and Cao Xueqin’s method most — he never says outright “Daiyu foresees her own death”, he only has her stand at the flower mound and ask one question. He hides the greatest grief inside the most ordinary gesture.
On “the end”: one stretch of white
好一似食尽鸟投林，落了片白茫茫大地真干净！
— Chapter 5, “Each Bird Flies to the Wood”
My own working translation: Like birds flying to the woods when the food is gone — leaving only a vast white emptiness, truly clean.
着重点The close of the twelve songs pulls every verdict poem tight with one thread. “Birds flying to the woods when the food is gone” is the tree falling and the monkeys scattering; “vast white emptiness” is not even a trace left behind.
My note: every time I read this line I have to stop. All the splendour before it — the garden, the poetry club, the crab feast — is swept away by this one sentence. Cao Xueqin is not writing “decline”; he is writing “clean”, and between the two words lies the whole length of the book.
The dispute over the last forty chapters
Who wrote the last forty chapters of the text we read has two long-standing answers:
- One says Gao E continued it: the tone and talent differ visibly from the first eighty, and set-pieces like “Daiyu burns her manuscripts” are not Cao Xueqin’s taste.
- One says another hand continued it and Gao E only edited: Cheng Weiyuan’s preface says the last forty were “found after searching everywhere”, of unknown origin.
The endings leaked by the Red Inkstone commentary often do not match the last forty chapters — the key evidence in the dispute. My own stance: read the last forty as “another author’s marginal note”, readable, but nothing to mortgage yourself on.
A trap in abridged editions
In middle school I read a “youth edition of the Dream”, cut down to the Daiyu–Baoyu–Baochai triangle and a few lively scenes, with no verdict poems, songs, or commentary at all. Only later did I learn that exactly what was cut is the book’s most essential skeleton.
For a real reading: begin with a Red Inkstone manuscript (a collated edition of a manuscript line such as the Jiaxu or Gengchen text) to see how the commentary hints at what follows; then read the Cheng–Gao 120-chapter text to see how the story was completed. Read both against each other, and you see how the book you know grew2.
4. What I Actually Use
- Read Chapter Five three times over. First for the story, second to match the verdict poems to the people, third with the songs alongside. After Chapter Five, every later episode reads differently.
- Chase the foreshadowing as clues. The riddles, the drinking-game verses, the poetry-club themes often quietly settle a character’s end. Slow down there — that is the hidden thread.
- Draw the line between the two editions. Trust Cao Xueqin for the first eighty chapters; treat the last forty as reference. Draw that boundary and many a “why did it change all of a sudden” finds its explanation.
5. Closing
The cruelest thing about the Dream is not that it is sad, but that it writes the sadness in the open first, then walks you toward it slowly. You know from the first page that it will break, yet you still want to watch how well it breaks. This is the exact opposite of the Shiji: the Grand Historian hid his judgement in the structure, and Cao Xueqin lays his out in the verdict poems.
Next: War and Peace. Also a crowd of lives, but Tolstoy gives no verdict poems in advance — he lets history move on its own and lets time speak for itself. I want to see whether the way that refuses to announce the ending is a heavier way.
Footnotes
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The authorship of the last forty chapters is still unsettled. One common view is “Gao E continued it”; another holds that the continuer is unknown and Gao E only edited and revised. Here the two views can only stand side by side, not be fixed. ↩
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The manuscript line and the printed line are two separate sources: the former is mostly an 80-chapter Story of the Stone with commentary, the latter the 120-chapter text issued by Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E. The two differ in wording, and modern collated editions usually take one as base and check it against the others. ↩ ↩2
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