Shih-Ch'ang Wu, On the Red Chamber Dream: A Critical Study of Two Annotated Manuscripts of the 18th Century (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1961). He and his wife, Gladys Yang, were imprisoned on suspicion of espionage during the Cultural Revolution, but they finished the translation as a team after their release in 1974. Xuxiang Suo argued, “Hawkes successfully conveyed the original textual information to foreign readers with smooth and beautiful English, but the loss of Chinese culture-loaded information is inevitable.

That is, Hawkes tries to maintain the range and contrasting levels of usage of the original while the Yangs smooth out the language with a "plain international English" and add explanations in footnotes.A comparatively androgynous beauty, Xiangyun looks good in men's clothes (once she put on Baoyu's clothes and Grandmother Jia thought she was a man), and loves to drink. At a more profound level, the author explores religious and philosophical questions, and the writing style includes echoes of the plays and novels of the late Ming, as well as poetry from earlier periods. Though it is unclear if the last 40 chapters of the discovered manuscript contained the original works of Cao, Irene Eber found the discovery "seems to confirm Cheng and Gao's claim that they merely edited a complete manuscript, consisting of 120 chapters, rather than actually writing a portion of the novel".

Suddenly, Fridolin, a doctor, is summoned to the bedside of a dying man, an elderly councilor, whose daughter he finds attractive and vaguely sensual. This culminates in the masquerade ball, an event of masked individualism, sex, and danger for Doctor Fridolin, the outsider. A novella that tells how through a simple sexual admission a husband and wife ware driven apart into rival worlds of erotic revenge. Baochai carries a golden locket with her which contains words given to her in childhood by a Buddhist monk. Yingchun's most famous trait, it seems, is her unwillingness to meddle in the affairs of her family.Baochai has a round face, fair skin, large eyes, and, some would say, a more voluptuous figure in contrast to Daiyu's slender willowy daintiness. Baoyu's elder cousin-in-law, young wife to Jia Lian (who is Baoyu's paternal first cousin), niece to Lady Wang. According to Lu Xun in the appendix to A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, Dream of the Red Chamber broke every conceivable thought and technique in traditional Chinese fiction; its realistic characterization presents thoroughly human characters who are neither "wholly good nor wholly bad", but who seem to inhabit part of the real world. The death of Fridolin’s patient prompts “ a shudder of revulsion” as he reflects how “ in compliance with eternal laws, corruption and decay had already set to work” in the man’s dead body. Gray, Ronald "The Stone's Curious Voyage to the West: A Brisk Overview of Honglou Meng's English Translation History and English Hongxue.

ISBN 0-14-044293-6, ISBN 0-14-044326-6, ISBN 0-14-044370-3; ISBN 0-14-044371-1, ISBN 0-14-044372-X).Everything seemed to be slipping from his grasp; everything was becoming increasingly unreal, even his home, his wife, his child, his profession, his very identity“, which is much, much funnier than it normally would be.

Frowned on by his strict Confucian father, Baoyu reads Zhuangzi and Romance of the Western Chamber on the sly, rather than the Four Books of classic Chinese education. He encounters his old friend, Nachtigall, who tells Fridolin that he will be playing piano at a secret high-society orgy that night. The novel's mythological elements were also inspired by the services Cao was involved in at the Dongyue Temple. Of all the characters in the novel, the circumstances of her life and early death are amongst the most mysterious. Qin Zhong and the novice Zhineng ( 智能, "Intelligent"; "Sapientia" in the Hawkes translation) fall in love but Qin Zhong dies soon after from a combination of his father's severe beating, sexual exhaustion, grief and remorse.The novel and its author have been described as among the most significant works of literature and literary figures of the past millennium. Hu Shih, in his Studies on A Dream of the Red Chamber (1921) argued that these chapters were written by Gao E, citing the foreshadowing of the main characters' fates in Chapter 5, which differs from the ending of the 1791 Cheng-Gao version. The adolescent son of Jia Zheng and his wife, Lady Wang, and born with a piece of luminescent jade in his mouth (the Stone), Baoyu is the heir apparent to the Rongguo House.