Is Dream of the Red Chamber Worth Reading? Yes, and How to Survive Its Four Hundred Characters

Somebody has counted the people in this novel. A reference dictionary published in 1986 by Yang Weizhen and Guo Rongguang gives an entry to each of the 447 characters who are named, and that number keeps more English readers out of this book than its length, its age or its reputation combined. It is also the wrong thing to be frightened of, and this piece is mostly about why.

A newer generation is meeting some of those names sideways. The Korean studio Project Moon released Limbus Company in February 2023, and one of its playable characters turns out to be Jia Baoyu, travelling under an alias so as not to spend the value of his real one. An eighteenth-century Chinese household novel is a strange thing to arrive at through a turn-based mobile game. It is still an arrival.

• ✅It is a domestic novel, not an adventure. The other three famous Chinese novels of its rank are about wars, outlaws and demons. This one is about a rich family running out of money.
• ✅Forty-odd characters matter; twelve carry it. The rest are the household around them, and the book does not expect you to hold them all.
• ✅Chapter five hands you the map. The hero falls asleep and reads a register that states what becomes of each of the principal women, in riddles, four per cent of the way in.
• ✅The last forty chapters are contested. Cao Xueqin died leaving eighty; what completes the standard text was printed in 1791 and has been argued over ever since.

Everything below is about getting in. If you would rather walk into the house than read about it, the playable Dream of the Red Chamber opens where the novel opens, with a minor gentleman asleep in his study and a monk and a priest discussing a stone that wants to be born.

🏮 Is it worth it, and what is it actually about?

It is worth it if you like watching a world get described at length. Very little is executed and a great deal is observed. The subject is the Jia family, an aristocratic clan in two connected mansions, at the moment when imperial favour starts to run out. The engine of the book is money and status leaking away while nobody in the house is willing to say so out loud.

Inside that decline the novel builds a walled garden and fills it with cousins in their teens. They found a poetry club, argue about plum blossom, tease the servants, fall in love with each other and are gradually removed one at a time by marriage, illness, scandal and the family's own finances. Cao Xueqin knew the shape from life. His great-grandfather Cao Xi held the post of Commissioner of Imperial Textiles at Jiangning, the modern Nanjing; in 1727 the Yongzheng Emperor confiscated the family's property and jailed his relative Cao Fu, and the impoverished household moved to Beijing.

Over that domestic surface sits a supernatural frame that arrives in the first chapter and never quite leaves. A sentient stone, left over when the goddess Nüwa repaired the sky, asks to be allowed into the mortal world. It gets its wish and is born as a boy with a piece of luminous jade in his mouth. That is Jia Baoyu, and the whole novel is what the stone sees. Readers who find him insufferable are having the reaction the book invites; the argument about him gets its own piece here.

The playable version starts you at the frame story: recognise the stone for what it is, follow the monk who is carrying it, or refuse the dream and wake up in an ordinary study in Suzhou. Role-play Dream of the Red Chamber →

👥 The four hundred characters, honestly counted

The honest figure is that four hundred-odd people are named and about forty of them speak enough to matter. Wikipedia's own summary, which is where most readers meet the scary number, puts it at nearly forty major characters and over four hundred additional ones, and cites the 1986 dictionary that has an entry for all 447. A novel of this length in English would carry a comparable crowd; nobody counts them, because they do not arrive with unfamiliar names.

What makes the crowd navigable is that it is organised, and the organisation is the family itself. There are two mansions, Rongguo and Ningguo, descended from two brothers. Within them, one grandmother at the top, three or four married women running things, a garden of unmarried girls, and a servant class with its own hierarchy, its own romances and its own catastrophes. Once you know which mansion a person belongs to, most of the four hundred stop needing to be remembered at all.

The playable version makes the same triage in its own way, carrying a cast of forty-four across eighteen scenes. That is roughly the working set a reader ends up with by chapter forty, arrived at from the other direction.

📖 Is it hard to read? Yes, in one specific way

It is harder to start than to continue, and the difficulty is bookkeeping rather than prose. The sentences are clear. What is hard is the first eighty pages, where you are asked to hold two households, a dozen adults, a garden of teenagers and a supernatural prologue before any of them have done anything memorable. Readers who quit almost always quit there.

Four things make the opening survivable. First, chapter five is the shortcut: Baoyu falls asleep in the Land of Illusion, reads registers of the household's women and hears twelve songs about them, and the book effectively hands you its own cast list with a hint of each fate attached. Second, chapter titles are two-line couplets that summarise what happens, so a table of contents doubles as a plot index. Third, most people are addressed by relation rather than by name in dialogue, so the family tree does the remembering for you once it is in place. Fourth, the book is genuinely episodic after the first act, and survives being read thirty pages at a time.

A reading plan that works: get to the end of chapter five without worrying about names, then stop and read chapter five again slowly. Accept that you will not know who anyone is until about chapter twenty. Everyone has that experience, and it is the book doing it rather than your attention span failing. From chapter twenty-three, when the cousins move into the garden, the book becomes almost episodic and the pages start turning themselves. The hard part is fifteen per cent of the length and it is all at the front.

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

That couplet is the whole novel in fourteen characters, and it is sitting there in chapter five for anyone who wants it. Gold and jade is the socially perfect marriage. Wood and stone is the debt from before either of them was born. The book is going to spend a hundred and fifteen more chapters on the distance between those two lines, and it tells you so at the start.

🌍 Why every English critic reaches for a Western novel

Because English has no shelf to put it on, so reviewers borrow one. The pattern is old and remarkably consistent: whenever an English-language critic has to explain what this book is, the explanation arrives in the form of a European novel. That habit says less about Cao Xueqin than about the reviewer's bookshelf, and it is still the fastest way to convey the scale of the thing.

Very much what The Brothers Karamazov is to Russian and Remembrance of Things Past is to French literature.

West added, in the same review, that it is beyond question one of the great novels of all literature. Kenneth Rexroth, reviewing the McHugh translation that same year, placed it among the greatest works of prose fiction in all the history of literature, on the grounds that it is profoundly humane. Two critics, one year, two Western yardsticks, and the same verdict underneath.

Skip past whether the praise is deserved. The interesting question is why a book carrying that press has stayed so thinly read in English for a century and a half, which we take apart separately. Part of the answer is that until 1986 there was no complete English translation to read at all, and which one to pick now is its own question.

The Chinese text is free at Project Gutenberg, which is where every chapter number in this series was checked, and about half the book exists in a free English translation from the 1890s. If you want the argument about the hero before you commit, the case for and against Baoyu is here, and the one character nobody argues about is the woman running the household.