Dream of the Red Chamber

A Dream of Red Mansions is China’s greatest full-length classicalnovel. It is a tragic love story set against the background of thedecline of an aristocratic family. With this as its central theme,the novel unfolds a vast and moving panorama of social history. Italso parades a memorable and dazzling cast of characters. Thewide-raging and meticulous structure of A Dream of Red Mansions,together with its literary merit in the form of exquisite language,make it universally recognized as the epitome of the art of theclassical novel in China.A Dream of Red Mansions was written in themid-18th century and was ten years in the making. The presenttranslation, by China’s leading literary translation team of YangXianyi and his wife Gladys Yang, is the version most complete andmost faithful to the original.