Dream Story

Product Information

Xifeng's husband and Baoyu's paternal elder cousin, a notorious womanizer whose numerous affairs cause much trouble with his jealous wife, including affairs with men that are not known by his wife.

Duke, Chinese History and Culture Volume 2 Seventeenth Century Through Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. Baoyu, however, is predestined to marry another cousin, Xue Baochai, whose grace and intelligence exemplify an ideal woman, but with whom he lacks an emotional connection. Among the avid readers was the young Mao Zedong, who later claimed to have read the novel five times and praised it as one of China's greatest works of literature.Suspecting that she is the woman who sacrificed herself for him, he views the woman's corpse in the morgue but cannot identify her. Much of this folklore was already popular during the Yuan dynasty and was retold in various ways in Cao's era in the Qing dynasty. This was also the first "complete" edition of The Story of the Stone, which they printed as the Illustrated Dream of the Red Chamber ( Xiùxiàng Hóng Lóu Mèng 繡像紅樓夢). Lady Wang later suspected her of having an affair with Baoyu and publicly dismisses her on that account; angry at the unfair treatment and of the indignities and slanders that attended her as a result, Qingwen dies of an illness shortly after leaving the Jia household. A married couple, Fridolin and Albertine, are troubled by events and jealous of each other’s attentions the night before at a masquerade ball.

Taking us on a guided tour of Vienna's seedy cafes, red-light district, decadent villas, hospitals and morgue, Schnitzler brilliantly uncovers the violence and depravity lurking beneath the surface of civilised society. A reworked version was performed in 1982 in Beijing by China Opera and Dance Drama Theatre featuring lead dancer Chen Ailian. Zhu Jian-chun argued that Hawkes’ choice to simply translate certain names that are puns makes the author's intentions clearer, and that the Yangs' choice of transliteration leaves the meaning more elusive, even if the transliterated names are more believable as character names. Later scholars echoed the philosophical aspects of love and its transcendent power as depicted in the novel. Hawkes recreates the meanings and sounds of the original with "remarkable precision, achieving much greater success than any one of his fellow translators in surmounting the limits of literary translation.There are currently more than thirty recorded sequels or continuations to the novel, including modern ones. The Stone, along with a companion (in Cheng-Gao versions they are merged into the same character), is then given a chance to learn from human existence, and enters the mortal realm, reborn as Jia Baoyu ("Precious Jade") – thus "The Story of the Stone".