Daiyu vs Baochai: the Debate Every Reader of Dream of the Red Chamber Ends Up In

Spoilers for the whole of Dream of the Red Chamber, including chapters 96 to 98 and how the novel ends for all three of the people in it.

Every reader of this novel ends up on a side, and the sides have names. Team Daiyu is for the cousin who arrives orphaned in chapter three, writes the best poetry in the book and cries at everything. Team Baochai is for the cousin who arrives with money, good sense and perfect manners, and never once says the wrong thing. The argument has been running for two hundred years and it is currently being had, in enormous volume, in Chinese.

What makes it worth having is that it is not a preference. The choice is built into the architecture of the book: chapter five, which is certainly Cao Xueqin's work, writes the outcome down in advance, and the chapters that deliver it were finished by somebody else after his death. Whichever side you pick, you lose.

• ✅Daiyu is the soulmate. The frame story gives her and Baoyu a debt contracted before either was born, and the novel never lets you doubt they belong together.
• ✅Baochai is the correct choice. Not the villain, and not stupid: the person any functioning family in that world would pick, for reasons the book takes seriously.
• ✅The family chooses Baochai, by deception. Chapter ninety-six calls the plan, in its own title, a scheme to conceal the news.
• ✅Nobody wins. Daiyu dies in chapter ninety-eight, the marriage fails, and Baoyu walks out of the world in chapter one hundred and nineteen.

Everything below is how the book gets there. If you would rather stand inside the scene than read about it, the playable Dream of the Red Chamber puts the wedding in your hands, on either side of the veil.

💔 The short answer: it is the book's argument, not a fandom

Because the two women are not rivals for one man's affection so much as two answers to the question the novel is actually asking, which is what a person owes the family that made them. Daiyu is what Baoyu wants. Baochai is what the Jia household needs. The book agrees with him and sides with them, and that contradiction is the plot.

The chapter-five songs put it in fourteen characters, in a line that occurs exactly once in the whole novel.

Everyone speaks of the match of gold and jade; I think only of the old vow between the wood and the stone.

Gold and jade is Baochai. She wears a gold locket whose inscription is said to pair with the one on Baoyu's jade, and the household repeats the pairing until it becomes a fact about the world. Wood and stone is Daiyu, and it is older than either of them. Chapter one has a Crimson Pearl Plant growing beside a sacred river, kept alive by a Stone-in-Waiting who watered it daily with sweet dew, and when the stone decides to be born into the world she decides to follow.

He gave me the grace of sweet dew and I have no such water to return. Since he goes down into the world as a man, I will go down as a woman, and repay him with all the tears of one lifetime.

That is the contract Daiyu is fulfilling every time she weeps, which is often. Readers who find her exhausting are reading her as a temperament. The novel means her as a debt being paid off, and the debt runs out when the tears do.

The playable version lets you take either seat: stand under the veil as the bride the family chose, or sit in the other courtyard with the manuscripts and the fire. Role-play Dream of the Red Chamber →

🌸 The scene that makes people Team Daiyu

Chapter twenty-seven, and it converts more readers than any argument does. Daiyu goes out with a hoe and a silk bag to bury fallen blossom, because sweeping it into the water would let it be carried off and fouled somewhere downstream. Then she sings over the grave. The song is the most famous set of verses in Chinese fiction and it is a young woman working out, in public, that she is the flower.

Yet peach and pear will, when next year returns, burst out again in bloom, but can it e'er be told who will next year dwell in the inner room?

The case for Daiyu is entirely in that stanza. She is the only person in the household who has understood her own position, which is that she is a dependent orphan with no money, no living parents and no leverage, in a house that will dispose of her when it is convenient. Everyone else in the book is managing the family's decline. She is the one saying out loud that it is going to eat them.

She is also, by some distance, the best writer in the novel. The poetry club chapters are a competition and she keeps winning it, and Baoyu's attachment to her is at least partly an attachment to somebody who thinks in the same register he does. What they have is not romance as the household understands the word. It is recognition.

🪙 The case for Baochai, which readers skip

She is the better person, and the novel knows it. Baochai is generous to servants nobody else notices, tactful with a mother-in-law who is impossible, and honest with Baoyu about the fact that she thinks he should sit the examinations. She is also, alone among the young women in the garden, competent with money in a house that is quietly running out of it.

The reason readers skip her is that the novel gives Daiyu the poetry and gives Baochai the good sense, and poetry wins arguments. But if you read the book as an account of how a family destroys itself, Baochai is the tragedy that gets least sympathy: a capable woman married off to a man who does not want her, by a household that then breaks under her.

🕯️ How the novel resolves it

With a deception, in three chapters, and it is worse than a simple substitution. By chapter ninety-six Baoyu has lost his jade and most of his mind with it. The household decides a wedding will restore him, and that the bride must be Baochai. They also decide that telling him so would kill him. The chapter title states the plan in the family's own language: Xifeng conceals the news and devises an ingenious scheme.

What they arrange is that Baoyu is told he is marrying Daiyu, and marries Baochai. The news leaks to Daiyu anyway, in the same chapter, and she stops eating. Chapter ninety-seven puts both halves of the night in its own two-line title: Lin Daiyu burns her manuscripts and severs her passion, Xue Baochai leaves her chamber for the great ceremony. She burns the poems she has been keeping since she was a child, in the other courtyard of the same house, while the wedding music plays.

She dies at the start of chapter ninety-eight, whose title returns her soul to the Realm of Separation and Sorrow. Baoyu, meanwhile, has lifted the veil and found the wrong cousin, and is by now too ill to be told anything. His grandmother knows perfectly well that his collapse is about Daiyu and cannot risk saying so. His maid, asked directly how Cousin Lin is taking the wedding, answers that Miss Lin is unwell.

The person who finally tells him is Baochai, and the way she does it is the most interesting decision in the last quarter of the novel. He asks her how she came to be there, since he remembers being married to Daiyu. She waits, and then says plainly that while he was out of his senses, Cousin Lin died. He sits bolt upright and asks whether that is really true. She answers that it is really true, and that nobody would say such a thing of a living person.

That is Baochai's character in four sentences. Everyone else in the household has lied to him for three chapters to protect him. His new wife, who has the most to lose from his grief, tells him the truth on the grounds that he has asked for it. It does not save the marriage. Wikipedia's summary of the ending is exact about why: the marriage ultimately fails because Baoyu's love for Daiyu persists after her death.

The last movement follows from there. Baoyu recovers enough to sit the imperial examination in chapter one hundred and nineteen, passes it in high rank, and then walks away from the family, the marriage and the world, leaving Baochai pregnant and the debt to the Crimson Pearl Plant paid in full.

🎭 So which side is right?

Neither, and the novel is unusually explicit that this is the point. Chapter five does not offer the reader a choice between two women; it hands over a register in which the pair share a single verse, one riddle for both of them, because they are two halves of one question. A book that wanted you to root for somebody would not do that.

The honest reading is that Team Daiyu is right about what Baoyu wants and Team Baochai is right about what the world is like, and the novel's subject is the gap. Insisting on a side turns a tragedy into a competition, which is a very human thing to do with a book that hurts. Two hundred years later, the competition is still where most of the energy goes.

If you want to know who orchestrated the substitution and how she lives with it, that is a separate person with a separate essay: the woman who runs the household is the best-written character in the book and by some distance the hardest to like.

Chapters 96 to 98 sit past the end of the free English translation, so the account above is translated from the Chinese textwith our own gloss; the flower-burial song is Joly's 1892 English, free at Project Gutenberg. If you want the chapters this post skipped over, the argument about Baoyu himself starts in chapter three, and which English version gets you to the ending at all is worth settling before you buy.