Cáo Xuěqín ; was a Chinese writer during the Qing dynasty. He is best known as the author of Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. His given name was Cáo Zhān and his courtesy name was Mèngruǎn . Wikipedia
“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.”
Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia,
Wu wei you chu you huan wu.
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 1
“Fall'n the great house once so secure in wealth,
Each scattered member shifting for himself.”
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“Let others laugh flower-burial to see:
Another year who will be burying me?”
Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760)
Cao Xueqin, as quoted in the introduction attributed to his younger brother (Cao Tangcun) to the first chapter of Dream of the Red Chamber, present in the jiaxu (1754) version (the earliest-known manuscript copy of the novel), translated by David Hawkes in The Story of the Stone: The Golden Days (Penguin, 1973), pp. 20–21
“All those whom history calls great
Left only empty names for us to venerate.”
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 2
“One day, when spring has gone and youth has fled,
The Maiden and the flowers will both be dead.”
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 27
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“Words on the paper mix with blood,
The extraordinary labor of ten years!”
(zh-TW) 字字看來皆是血，十年辛苦不尋常 。
Red Inkstone, couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); quoted in Zhou Ruchang's Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181.
Couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); the couplet is "generally considered to be written by Cao Xueqin" according to Wong Kwok-pun in Dreaming across Languages and Cultures (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), footnote on p. 71, but Zhou Ruchang attributes it to Red Inkstone in Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181. note: Variant translations: note: Every word [in the novel] which one looks at is a drop of blood. The ten years ' painstaking labour is no commonplace.
Source: From On The Red Chamber Dream by Shichang Wu (Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 24
