Reading note II · The length
How long is Dream of the Red Chamber?
紅樓夢篇幅
There are two answers because there are two books: a 120-chapter Chinese novel, and — in the English most readers buy — about 845,000 words laid over 2,339 pages of story in five volumes. Everything in the tables below is that second book, or arithmetic done on it in the open.
The book in numbers 數字
| Measure | Figure | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Chapters | 120 | The Cheng-Gao printed text of 1791–92, which is the book people read. The manuscripts that circulated in the author's lifetime stop at 80. |
| Author's share | 80 | Cao Xueqin worked on it through the 1740s until his death in 1763 or 1764; the first 80 chapters were complete and being copied by hand. |
| Words, English | ≈845,000 | Estimated for the Penguin Classics translation of the whole 120 chapters. |
| Pages of story | 2,339 | The core text of the five Penguin volumes, excluding prefaces, introductions and appendices. |
| Pages with apparatus | over 2,800 | The same five volumes counted whole, which is what lands on a table. |
| One chapter | ≈7,000 words · ≈20 pages | 845,000 and 2,339 divided by 120. Chapters run uneven, so this is a mean and not a promise. |
| Named people | 447 | The number of entries in the 1986 红楼梦辞典; the novel is usually described as carrying nearly forty major characters and over four hundred minor ones. |
| Leaves on this site | 40 | Every one of those names is not served here; the register rows below the leaves carry the rest. |
Nothing here is a page count of a Chinese edition: the 120 chapters are printed as three volumes in Beijing and five in Harmondsworth, and a Chinese hardback's length moves with the type size. Quote a page count only against the edition you are holding.
What that is in evenings 幾晚
The hours below are 845,000 words divided by a reading rate, then cut into sittings. Change the rate and the schedule moves; the arithmetic is shown so you can.
| You read | The book takes | Working |
|---|---|---|
| half an hour a night | about 4 months | one chapter ≈ 7,000 words ≈ 28 minutes at 250 words a minute; 120 nights |
| an hour a night | about 2 months | two chapters a night; 60 nights |
| a long weekend | about 7 sittings of 8 hours | 56 hours of straight reading, which nobody does; the number is there to be disbelieved usefully |
| only Cao Xueqin's 80 | about 3 months, or 37 hours | 80/120 of the word count at the same rate — the first three volumes of the Penguin set, and nothing after them |
Why the counts move 版本
Length was the first thing English readers objected to. Reviewing the novel in 1873, Alfred Lister counted twenty volumes in it and called the bulk a disadvantage, and the number of people, he said, with the mysteriously heavy introductory chapters, made it a book no heroic effort would ever place in Western letters. He was reviewing a partial translation of the first fifty-six chapters.
What changes between editions is not the chapter count but what is folded in around it: how many of the red-commented manuscripts' variants are printed, whether the last forty chapters are there at all, how much of the poetry is kept and whether it is footnoted to death. Zhou Ruchang distrusted the added chapters so completely that his editions run to 80, and in 2006 he and the novelist Liu Xinwu published an 80-chapter text with an ending of their own reconstruction. Penguin's set is 5 volumes because the first translator resigned an Oxford chair to do the first 80 chapters and his son-in-law took the remaining 40 after his death.
The honest short version 節本
There is no good abridgement in print. Wang Chi-Chen's 1929 version, which led with the love story, was expanded in 1958 and still stopped at chapter 60; Florence and Isabel McHugh's 1958 abridgement was made from Franz Kuhn's 1932 German, not from the Chinese. What does exist is a shorter complete book: read the first 80 chapters in Hawkes, which is a whole novel that simply has its ending unwritten, and go to the register verses in chapter 5 for what was planned. This site's leaves do that — the verses are quoted above each life, and the endings come from the 120-chapter text.
The recommendation is ours. The facts under it — what each abridgement covers and from which language — are from the sources below.
Where these figures come from 出處
- English Wikipedia, “Dream of the Red Chamber” — the Penguin page and word counts, the Cheng-Gao editions, Lister's 1873 review, Zhou Ruchang's 80-chapter text (read 30 Sep 2026)
- The Guardian, David Hawkes's obituary — 120 chapters complete; the first 80 in three volumes, 1973, 1977 and 1980
- Wikipedia, John Minford — the 40 chapters of The Story of the Stone he translated