The stone and the flower

In the world above, a magical, sentient stone is left behind and neglected after having been overlooked when a Goddess was mending the Heavens. The stone falls in love with a crimson petal flower and waters the flower every day. In time, the flower is transformed into a fairy girl, who promises to repay her debt of water to the stone by descending into the world of men and shedding tears for him there.

Thus opens one of the most amazing books I have ever read, the unfinished Qing Dynasty Chinese novel entitled The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin (also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber), which I read in the version completed by Gao E, subsequently translated by David Hawkes and John Minford (available in five volumes from Penguin Classics).

After the quasi-mythical opening scene, the rest of this novel takes place firmly on the ground in the houses of a wealthy Beijing family in which the stone is reincarnated as Jia Baoyu ("precious jade"), a boy on the edge of puberty and the flower as Lin Daiyu, an intelligent, beautiful but sickly girl consumed by love for Baoyu. The third corner of the tragic love triangle is formed by Xue Baochai, a cousin of Baoyu's - also pretty and well educated but more conventional than Daiyu - who, almost from her first appearance, is designated by the family as Baoyu's prospective marriage partner.

You could call the story a Chinese Upstairs Downstairs as it progresses through the late childhood and early adulthood of the main characters, weaving in an endless array of detailed sub-stories and vignettes about the other members of this extended family and their cohort of servants - their maids in particular. Meals, tea ceremonies, religious practices, medical procedures and many other aspects of eighteenth century Chinese life are described in fascinating detail (don't read the book when you're hungry!). However, while the story is comparable to the TV soap opera in terms of scale and the fact that it covers servants as well as gentry, it goes withpout saying that it also far outstrips the series in terms of its lyricism and depth. Among the characters that stand out in my mind are Baoyu's aunt by marriage, Wang Xifeng, married to the feckless Jia Lin. She plays the role of dutiful daughter-in-law perfectly - pretty, intelligent, a good household manager but at times frighteningly ruthless. Also noteworthy is the authoritarian matriarch Grandmother Jia, who as the oldest member of the family is also its head. Among the servants, Hua Xiren and Qingwen, both maids of Baoyu, stand out. The former is also his unofficial concubine; the latter falls victim to Xifeng's jealousy. Indeed, the female characters are, in general, much the stronger ones; their male counterparts are often feckless and irresponsible (one exception being Baoyu's father, Jia Zheng, who is a strict Confucian scholar and disciplinarian).

The three themes that ultimately bind this sprawling novel together are: the tragic resolution of the relationship between Baoyu and Daiyu; the collapse of the family's fortunes; and Baoyu's metamorphosis from an immature young man to one who achieves spiritual enlightement and withdraws from the everyday world.

It's quite daunting to start out on a novel of nearly 2,500 pages but, trust me, it's worth it!