Cao+Xueqin,+China's+greatest+novelist

=Cao Xuequin, China's greatest novelist= (To say his name, say Ts'ow Shway-kwin)

Shakespeare and Homer are the greatest writers in Western civilisation, but in China it is Cao Xueqin (?1715-1763) who is the greatest.

Early Life
Not much is known about Cao Xueqin's life. Nobody knows exactly when he was born, that's why there is a question mark in front of his birthdate. Nobody knows for sure who his father was, or anything much about his job. His family had been rich and powerful when they worked for the Emperor Kangxi (say Kang-zee) from the Qing Dynasty* (say Ching Din-as-tee) but when Cao Xueqin was just a little boy the Emperor YongZheng (say Yong-zeng) came to power. Then they lost all their money and power and were very poor. They had to move from Nanjing to Beijing. But even though they were poor, Cao Xueqin learned to read and write, and he was an artist too. The Qing emperors all thought that education was very important and they made sure that everyone who worked for them had a good education. Cao Xueqin's grandfather (1658-1712) for example had been a famous poet, book collector and publisher, and he liked plays as well.

Cao Xueqin's famous book
Once his family was in trouble with the new emperor, things were really bad for Cao Xueqin. He could not get a good job in the government, and he sometimes did not have enough to eat. After a while he went to live in a village in the hills near Beijing, and probably made a living selling his brush paintings. About 1750 he started writing the novel that would make him famous for all time. It was called //The Dream of the Red Chamber//, and it was about a powerful and rich family that slowly lost everything, just like his own family had. The story has many characters, but the most important are Jia Baoyu and his beautiful cousin Lin Daiyu. They love each other but the story has a sad ending. (Xueqin died just before he finished his book, so the ending was written by somebody else, Gao E (c.1738-c.1815), so maybe this sad ending was not how Xueqin planned it.)

The end of Cao Xueqin's life
Cao Xueqin spent the last years of his life in Beijing, the capital of China, but nobody is sure exactly where he lived. He was very, very poor. He is said to have died on Chinese New Year's Eve in 1763, just a few months after his baby son died.

How do we know all this about Cao Xueqin?
Cao Xueqin's friends began telling his story after his death. They said he was a very intelligent and talented man, who worked for ten years on his book, and they were helping him to copy it so that it could be published. He was a talented artist and made a living selling his beautiful paintings, (mainly of cliffs and rocks) and he was also wrote poetry. But he also drank too much.

[[image:Dream of the Red Chamber.jpg width="128" height="193" align="left"]]Why should students in Australia know about Cao Xinqin?
Cao Xueqin's book //Dream of the Red Chamber// is famous, and people all over the world still read it even though it was written more than 250 years ago. Chinese people are very proud of this great author, the way that English speaking people are proud of Shakespeare. And because China is becoming very powerful and important, even if we don't agree with everything they do, we should know about their history and culture and the things that they admire. There is a children's version of //Dream of the Red Chamber// in our school library. Look for it in the Fiction section on the XYZ shelf.


 * A dynasty is a ruling family that stays in power for many generations.

[|Chinese Lives, the People Who Made a Civilization], by Victori H. Mair, Sanping Chen and Frances Wood, Thames and Hudson, 2013, ISBN: 9780500251928, pp. 177-179 Cao Xueqin, [|Wikipedia]
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