Dream of The Red Chamber

Dream of the Red Chamber is a novel with great cultural richness. It depicts a multi-layered yet inter-fusing tragic human world through the eye of a talentless stone the Goddess used for sky mending. Jia Baoyu, the incarnation of the stone, witnessed the tragic lives of "the Twelve Beauties of Nanjing", experienced the great changes from flourishing to decline of a noble family and thus gained unique perception of life and the mortal world. Revolving around Jia Baoyu and focusing on the tragic love between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai against the backdrop of the Great View Garden, the novel portrays a tragedy in which love, youth and life are ruined as well as exposes and profoundly reflects the root of the tragedy – the feudal system and culture.


Lin Daiyu is one of the twelve beauties of Jinling, and the only daughter of Lin Ruhai and Jia Min. After her parents passed away, her grandma picked her up to stay with her in pity of her loneliness. Although she was an orphan who had to live under others' roof, she was proud and aloof, innocent and upright, a rebel against feudalism as Jia Baoyu. She never persuaded him to pursue the path of becoming a government official. She despised power and dignitaries and shared the same ideal and interest with Jia Baoyu. However, their true love was relentlessly smothered by her grandma and Wang Xifeng. Therefore, Lin Daiyu ended up with a tragic death.

Jia Baoyu is the key character in A Dream of the Red Mansions. Born in a rich family, smart and debonair, he was the inheritor of the Jia family. But his personality led him to betray his family.

Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu became increasingly fond of each other, their innocent love was suffocated by the feudal concept of "Jinyu Liangyuan (match made in heaven)", which resulted in an entrenched depression from deep inside. Suffering from long-term lovesickness, coupled with the heavy shock from the fact that Baoyu had to marry someone else, Lin lost her life at a very young age. Later Jia became a monk in a faraway place, mourning of his beloved one.