The Golden Days

by Cao Xueqin

  Two months later the man who had succeeded Li Xu as Textile Commissioner in Soochow and who happened to be a brother-in-law of Nian Gengyao was dismissed from his post and his estate confiscated. He and his wife and concubine all hanged themselves.

  Yinsi and Yintang, the unfortunate Cur and Swine, themselves both died in prison after months of sadistic mal- treatment in September of this year.

  In March of the following year (1727) Li Xu was arrested and imprisoned for the crime of having once offered Yinsi a present of Soochow sing-song girls. His fate is unknown, but it seems probable that he died in prison.

  In January of 1728 (a grim New Year’s present) Cao Fu and Sun Wencheng — the latter had been Textile Commissioner in Hangchow since 17067 — were both dismissed and their estates confiscated.

  That these confiscations could be brutal and frightening affairs seems to be indicated by the frequency with which those who were subjected to this favourite punishment of Yongzheng’s committed suicide. The victim’s property would be surrounded in a surprise raid by the military, his senior servants would be carried off for questioning, and the house sealed and no one allowed in or out while the investigating officials ransacked it from top to bottom and wrote down their inventory of its contents.

  Cao Fu’s own dismissal does not appear to have been directly connected with the purge of the Princes’ party, though a belated attempt was made to implicate him with it when the investigating officer discovered two gilt lions belonging to Yin- tang in the Cao family temple. Cao Fu had been manifestly too young for his post and it was certainly more on the grounds of incompetence than anything else that he was dismissed in the first instance, whatever else may have emerged against him subsequently. Nevertheless it is important to remember that the dismissal occurred in the latter stages of a major political purge. For two years before the axe fell upon the Caos themselves heads had been falling to left and right of them, and the doom-laden atmosphere which from time to time obtrudes itself upon the innocent frivolities of the novel is not neces- sarily a literary device, but the faithful portrayal of a tension that was actually felt.

  We know that the Caos had a house or houses in Peking which they were allowed to keep and that some of them moved to Peking after their Fall. We also know that there was a branch of the family that had been in Peking all along – including the three elder brothers of Cao Fu with whom he had always been on bad terms. The novel contains a number of passages in which poor relations are humiliated by their more fortunate kinsmen, as for example Jia Yun’s treatment in chapter 24 at the hands of his uncle Bu Shi-ren (a name that could be roughly anglicized as Mr Hardleigh Hewmann). In commenting on such passages Red Inkstone darkly observes that only those who have experienced this kind of thing can possibly know how bad it is; so it seems safe to assume that the Nanking Caos met with some sort of rebuff from their relations at the capital. The latter may, in any case, have felt that Yongzheng’s victims were too dangerous to help. The fact of the matter is, however, that we simply do not know. Having become ‘unpersons’, the Caos now disappear almost completely from the records.

  There is no doubt about Cao Xueqin’s intention of making the history of his own family’s decline and fall the general background of the novel; but the exact relationship existing between the characters of the novel and the various members of the Cao family is much less certain. Some scholars like Zhou Ruchang have striven to establish a precise parallelism between the two, but the case for this is extremely flimsy. The commentaries establish beyond doubt that many of the characters are portraits of real people, but it does not follow that the relationships between the different characters in the novel were those of the people in real life whom they represent. All the evidence goes to show that Xueqin deliberately mixed the generations up as a means of disguising the facts. We know, for example, that one of Cao Yin’s daughters who married the Manchu prince Nersu was probably the model for the Imperial Concubine (her up-grading in the novel is typical); and the Manchu Yurui expressly says that Bao-yu’s ‘sisters’ were really portraits of the author’s aunts.

  In any attempt to relate the characters and events of the novel to the persons and events of Xueqin’s childhood the identification of the novel’s main character, Bao-yu, is crucial. Bao-yu is an almost clinical picture8 of the kind of child whom old ladies refer to in lowered voices as ‘a very strange little boy’. Yet for all the portrait’s objectiveness, the struggle towards emotional maturity is recorded with such a wealth of detail and understanding that it is hard to believe that the inner side at least of the character is not a chronicle of the author’s own experience. It used, in fact, until quite recently, to be assumed as a matter of course that Bao-yu was a self- portrait of the author. But this assumption naturally raises the other question: who Was Xueqin?

  The likeliest hypothesis until recently (or so it seemed to me) was that Cao Xueqin was the posthumous child of Cao Yin’s only son Cao Yong – the young man who inherited Cao Yin’s place as Textile Commissioner and died only three years later. It is known from the archives that Cao Yong’s wife was seven months pregnant when he died. Assuming that the child was a boy and survived, he would have been just thirteen in 172 8 when the big crash came – the age of Bao-yu throughout quite a large section of the novel.

  Admittedly Cao Xueqin is known to have had a younger brother, and Cao Yong’s posthumous child could only have had one in the – in those days – highly improbable event of his mother’s remarriage. But the Chinese word for ‘brother’ can also be used to indicate the sons of paternal uncles, so the objection is not an insuperable one. Another objection might be that in the novel both Bao-yu’s parents are living. But then how puzzling is Bao-yu’s relationship with those parents! He lives not with them but with his Grannie; and although they all inhabit the same mansion, whole weeks seem to go by without his seeing his father Jia Zheng at all.

  If Cao Xueqin was really Cao Yong’s posthumous child, it would be quite natural for him to live with Grannie and quite natural for Grannie, who had lost her husband and her only son within a few years of each other, to dote upon this last male survivor of the line as her ‘precious jewel’ (which is what ‘Bao-yu’ means) and to look with indifference, if not positive resentment, on Cao Fu, her adopted ‘son’ by Imperial fiat, who had inherited the business and usurped the position of her darling boy. Equally, it would be quite natural for Cao Fu to look upon Cao Xueqin as a spoilt little brat in need of a good hiding – which is precisely Jia Zheng’s attitude towards Bao-yu in the novel – and to feel terrified of the consequences when he at last succeeded in giving him one and Grannie, as a reprisal, threatened to withdraw her patronage. As for’ the girls’, they would be the unmarried daughters of Cao Yin, probably still spry enough in his sixties to have fathered one or two children on his concubines. In the novel two out of the Three Springs are in fact concubine’s children, and Grandmother Jia’s somewhat casual treatment of this luckless trio would be a reflection of Grannie Cao’s attitude to her husband’s daughters by another woman.

  Unfortunately for this splendid theory, a clan register of the Liaodong branch of the Cao family came to light in Peking a few years ago which, if it is genuine, makes it clear that Cao Yong’s posthumous son was not Cao Xueqin but a person called Cao Tianyou, who at one period during his life held a small government appointment.

  Turning for enlightment to Red Inkstone’s commentary, we find that it abounds in what appear to be clues to Xueqin’s paternity, if only we knew how to use them. He is constantly telling us of experiences that he shared with the author or with Bao-yu or with both – for example, when he says of a passage in which Bao-yu is shown in a particularly unflattering light: ‘I felt quite angry with the author when I first read this, but then I realized that in this instance he was probably talking about himself; or when he apostrophizes the author in connection with a passage in chapter 8 in which Grand- mother Jia gives a First Meeting present to Bao-yu’s schoolboy friend Qin
Zhong (evidently modelled on a real person): ‘Do you still remember about that little gold charm? Objects bring back their memories. You tear my heart!’ It seems from this highly probable that Red Inkstone was about the same age as Cao Xueqin and that the two of them went to school together. If the relationship between the two of them was so close, clearly the problem of identifying one will be closely bound up with the problem of the other one’s identity.

  One of the difficulties of identifying Red Inkstone is the question of’Odd Tablet’. This is a signature which begins to replace that of Red Inkstone on comments dating from a year or two before Cao Xueqin’s death. All the latest signed comments are Odd Tablet ones. The full signature is ‘Old Man Odd Tablet’ or ‘Old Odd Tablet’. Sometimes he refers to himself as ‘The Old Crock’ or ‘Old Useless’.

  Until recently it was widely believed that Red Inkstone and Odd Tablet were one and the same person. Odd Tablet shows the same familiarity with the author and his family affairs; he writes in pretty much the same style; he refers to Red Inkstone comments of an earlier date much as if he had written them himself. It was assumed by those who believed them to be the same person that Red Inkstone had at some stage begun to feel his age and decided on a change of pseudonym. There were certain difficulties about this. The ‘Old Man’ part of the signature presented peculiar difficulties to those like Zhou Ruchang who thought that Red Inkstone was a lady, and ‘Old Crock’ suggested an advanced stage of decrepitude which seemed unlikely in one whose commentary at times made him appear no older than the author. But people do gives themselves peculiar pseudonyms, and these difficulties were not as a rule felt to be insuperable.

  Then a new Red Inkstone manuscript turned up in the possession of an old Manchu family in Nanking. Unfortunately it very soon disappeared again; but in the interim it had been seen and described by an expert, who copied out and pub- lished a number of the more important-looking comments. If we accept his testimony, we are obliged to admit that Red Inkstone and Odd Tablet must be two people. The evidence consists of two parts:

  (1) The first section of chapter 1 ends with the following quatrain:

  Pages full of idle words

  Penned with hot and bitter tears:

  All men call the author fool;

  None his secret message hears.

  The Red Inkstone manuscript discovered in 1927 contains the following comment on these verses in the upper margin above them:

  Only one who understood the secret message of this book could have the hot and bitter tears with which to finish it. Xueqin, having run out of tears, departed this life on the last day of ren-wu (12 February 1763) leaving his book unfinished. I have wept so much for Xueqin that I fear I too shall soon run out of tears. I often wish that I could find where that Gteensickness Peak is so that I could ask Brother Stone about his story. What a pity there is no scabby- headed monk to take me there I If only the Creator would produce another Xueqin and another Red Inkstone to complete this book, how happy the two of us would be, down there together in the World of Shades !

  Written in tears,

  eighth month of jia-wu (September 1774)

  This used to be one of the most important bits of evidence in support of the view that Red Inkstone and Odd Tablet were the same person, since it seemed to show that Red Inkstone survived Xueqin by many years and continued to comment on the manuscript during all the years that Odd Tablet was doing so. But the recently-discovered Nanking manuscript gave the date of this comment not as jia-wu but as jia-shen (the characters for wu and sben are not greatly dissimilar when written in a cursive hand) – i.e. not as 1774 but as 1764, only a year and a half after Xueqin’s death.

  (2) On a passage in chapter 22 in which Xi-feng is shown choosing plays, a manuscript which first came to light in the thirties has two rather cryptic comments by Odd Tablet, evidently written at some interval of time. The first says:

  Re Xi-feng choosing plays, Red Inkstone doing the writing, etc.: not many of us still left who know about this. Alas!

  (Odd Tablet has a great weakness for mournful expletives.) The second says:

  Last time I read through this section I wrote “not many of us still left who know about this”. Now – Summer, ding-hai (1767) – this Old Crock is the only one surviving. A painful thought!

  In the newly-found Nanking manuscript the second of these comments was found in a much expanded form:

  Last time I read through this section I wrote “not many of us still left who know about this”. Since then, in only a few years, Xueqin, Red Inkstone and Almond have all successively passed on, leaving – Summer, ding-hai - this Old Crock as the only sur- vivor. A painful thought!

  Putting these two bits of new evidence together, it now looks as if Red Inkstone must have died some time between 1764 and 1767, only a year or two after Xueqin – as he seems himself to have predicted.

  Zhiyanzhai, the Chinese name I have translated ‘Red Inkstone’, strictly speaking means ‘Carmine Inkstone’ or ‘Rouge Inkstone’, zbi being the name of the unguent which Chinese ladies once used for reddening their cheeks and lips with. There have been many theories about the significance of this pseudonym. Those who favoured a female com- mentator thought it an appropriate one for a lady. Those who favoured a male one thought it just the kind of pseudonym that an homme galant would choose (dashing off a comment or two with a lady’s lipstick, perhaps, in between sips of champagne from her slipper).

  Zhao Gang, however, has demonstrated that ‘Carmine Inkstone’ was probably the name of a greatly prized antique inkstone belonging to Cao Yin. As a family heirloom it would have passed successively to his son Cao Yong, and, after Cao Yong’s death, to his grandson Cao Tianyou. The latter might well have salvaged some such tiny treasure from the ruin of his house and clung to it when all else was lost. And that he should have called himself’the Master of the Red Inkstone’ in later life would seem reasonable enough, seeing that he was master of very little else. In short Zhao Gang believes that Red Inkstone was Cao Yong’s posthumous son Cao Tianyou, from which it would follow by a simple process of deduction that Xueqin must almost certainly have been the son of Cao Fu, that nephew of Cao Yin’s who became his posthumously adopted son after Cao Yong’s death.

  As a child Cao Xueqin’s given name was not ‘Xueqin’ but ‘Zhan’, which means ‘favour’. ‘Tianyou’ – Red Inkstone’s name – means’ Heaven succours us’. It seems highly probable that just as Tianyou’s name records the gratitude of Cao Yin’s family for the birth of a male child to carry on the line after the death of its only heir, so Cao Zhan’s name records Cao Fu’s gratitude for the imperial favour which made him Cao Yin’s heir and allowed him to succeed his cousin as Textile Commissioner in Nanking.

  Bao-yu, then, as I think Wu Shichang was the first to point out, must be a composite portrait. It is a portrait based partly on the author himself and partly on his cousin and brother-by-adoption, Cao Tianyou.9 Born in the same year, brought up in the same household and dying only a couple of years after him, it is scarcely surprising that Red Inkstone should seem so knowing both about the author and about his character Bao-yu, when so often he is commenting on a shared experience. It was he who made the fair copies of Xueqin’s drafts – much as a friend or relation might type someone’s manuscript for him today – reading through them afterwards and noting down comments, queries and suggestions to be discussed later by Xueqin, Xueqin’s younger brother and the other members of the little family group who were privy to the great enterprise.

  One member – clearly a somewhat older one – of this little group was Odd Tablet, and it was he who carried on the work of editing, annotating and recopying after Red Inkstone had died. Who he was and when he died there is no means of knowing. Zhao Gang has suggested that he may have been Xueqin’s own father, Cao Fu. Certainly the pseudonym would fit. The word hu which I have translated ‘tablet’ was the spatula-shaped ceremonial object of wood or ivory .held in the clasped hands of a government official wearing
full court dress, and Cao Fu, living out a seedy, impoverished old age in Peking, may well have chosen the name ‘Odd Tablet’ in ironical remembrance of the youthful Textile Commissioner of his Nanking days.

  It was certainly Odd Tablet who finally got the first eighty chapters of The Story of the Stone into shape for release to the public. By the end of the sixties manuscript copies were already coming onto the book market; and though they were still entitled Red Inkstone’s Reannotated Story of the Stone, Red Inkstone had by then been dead for some years and the title was preserved merely out of respect for his memory. Odd Tablet himself preferred the title A Dream of Red Mansions and used this title at the head of his ‘Advice to the Reader’ which follows the title page. Some very late manuscripts may even have borne the Dream title on their title page as well.

  Why did none of the Red Inkstone manuscripts go beyond the novel’s eightieth chapter? It used to be assumed that Cao Xueqin died before he had time to write any more, but all the evidence is against this. All the evidence suggests that he finished the novel long before he died and was merely re- vising and correcting during his final years. It was the revising and the filling in of various missing bits, particularly poems, which was unfinished at his death. In the manuscript copy of chapter 22 the last page or two is missing and there is a marginal note by Red Inkstone explaining that the pages had got torn off and lost and that he was waiting for Xueqin to supply him with fresh copy. This is followed by a separate sheet which contains, among other things, the following comment: