Cao Xueqin - The Story of The Stone: The Debt of Tears (Volume IV)

PENGUIN CLASSICS

CAO XUEQIN (?171563) was born into a family which for three generations held the office of Commissioner of Imperial Textiles in Nanking, a family so wealthy that they were able to entertain the Emperor Kangxi four times. But calamity overtook them and their property was confiscated. Cao Xueqin was living in poverty near Peking when he wrote his famous novel The Story of the Stone (also know as The Dream of the Red Chamber), of which this is the fourth volume. The first three volumes, The Golden Days, The Crab-Flower Club and The Warning Voice, translated by David Hawkes, and volume five, The Dreamer Wakes, translated by John Minford, are also published in Penguin Classics.

GAO E (?17401815) was a Chinese Bannerman of the Bordered Yellow Banner, who for the last twenty years of his life worked in the Grand Secretariat and the Censorate in Peking. In 1792 he and his friend Cheng Weiyuan published for the first time a complete version of The Story of the Stone in 120 chapters. Previously, handwritten copies of the novel had circulated, which ended with the eightieth chapter. Cheng and Gao claimed that they edited the last forty chapters of their complete version from a fragmentary manuscript by the original author.

JOHN MINFORD was born in 1946. He studied Chinese at Oxford and at the Australian National University, and has taught in China, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He has edited (with Geremie Barm) Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, and (with Joseph S. M. Lau) Chinese Classical Literature: An Anthology of Translations. He is currently translating the Strange Tales of Pu Songling (16401715), Sunzis The Art of War, and the Martial Arts fiction of the contemporary Hong Kong novelist Louis Cha (Jin Yong).

A CHINESE NOVEL BY
CAO XUEQIN
IN FIVE VOLUMES

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VOLUME IV
THE DEBT OF TEARS

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TRANSLATED BY JOHN MINFORD

EDITED BY GAO E

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This translation first published 1982

Translation copyright John Minford, 1982
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196891-9

FOR RACHEL

Chinese proper names in this book are spelled in accordance with a system invented by the Chinese and used internationally, which is known by its Chinese name of Pinyin. A full explanation of this system will be found overleaf, but for the benefit of readers who find systems of spelling and pronunciation tedious and hard to follow a short list is given below of those letters whose Pinyin values are quite different from the sounds they normally represent in English, together with their approximate English equivalents. Mastery of this short list should ensure that names, even if mispronounced, are no longer unpronounceable.

c = ts
q = ch
x = sh
z = dz
zh = j