The mid-18th-century Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin, also called The Story of the Stone, widely regarded as the greatest work of Chinese fiction and one of the Four Great Classical Novels of China. It follows the slow ruin of the aristocratic Jia family through the doomed love of the sensitive boy Jia Baoyu and his fragile cousin Lin Daiyu. Cao left it unfinished at his death around 1763; the common 120-chapter version, completed in the Cheng-Gao printed editions associated with Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E, was printed in 1791–92, and both that ending and its authorship are debated.
A great Chinese family lives in a walled garden of silk, poetry, and feasts, and at its center a tender boy loves the cousin his family will not choose for him. He loves the brilliant, sickly Lin Daiyu. In the common 120-chapter ending, his family marries him to the steady Xue Baochai instead; Daiyu dies, the household falls, and the boy walks away from the world into a monk’s robe. The whole shimmering story is framed as the dream of a single magical stone, a lesson that all the beauty and grief of the world is, in the end, dust. This is Dream of the Red Chamber, often called the greatest novel China ever produced.