Reading note I · The story
What happens in Dream of the Red Chamber
紅樓夢情節
Five bands of chapters, the turn in each, and the leaf to open for whoever carries it. The ending is in the last row: so is it in the first five chapters, in verse, which is the book's own argument that a summary spoils nothing.
The five bands 五代
The chapter numbers are the book's; the cuts between bands are ours, drawn where the leaves on this site start and stop carrying the weight.
| # | Chapters | What happens | Whose leaf to open |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | 1–5 | A stone left over from the mending of the heaven asks to be born, and is born as Jia Baoyu with the jade in his mouth. His aunt dies and the orphaned cousin Lin Daiyu comes to live at the Rongguo mansion; the Xue family arrives with a murderer in its baggage. Asleep in his sister-in-law's room, Baoyu is shown the registers of Jinling, where each woman's ending is written as a verse he cannot read. | Jia Baoyu · Lin Daiyu · Xue Baochai · Qin Keqing · Xiangling |
| II | 6–18 | The house at the top of its credit. Qin Keqing dies of an illness no physician can name and is buried with a wood above her rank; a daughter of the house is made a consort, and to receive her visit the family builds a garden they cannot afford. Its first inmates are the children and the maids who teach them. | Wang Xifeng · Jia Zhen · Jia Yuanchun · Granny Liu · Jia Rui |
| III | 19–54 | The garden years: the poetry club, the crab feast, the chrysanthemum prizes, a country woman walked round an estate she cannot thank them for. Underneath the club, the half-brother's malice, a maid's drowned death, Jia Zheng near to beating his son to death, and his own father trying to add the old woman's favourite maid to a son's bed. | Jia Tanchun · Li Wan · Xiren · Qingwen · Jinchuan · Yuanyang · Jia Huan · Xue Baoqin |
| IV | 55–80 | Money trouble turns into policing. Tanchun runs the household against the odds and cannot stop the holes; a silk purse found in a garden seat brings a search of the whole quarter, and the search brings out what everyone had arranged not to see. The best maid dies in disgrace; two girls of the register go to the husbands their verses named. | Qingwen · Jia Tanchun · Wang Xifeng · Lady Xing · Jia Yingchun · Xiangling · Fangguan |
| V | 81–120 | The added forty chapters. Yuanchun dies; a bride is swapped in the sedan and Daiyu burns her poems at the hour of the bridal lamps; the estates are confiscated and the old woman dies, and the maids who loved her go one way and another. The heir sits the examination, gets the degree the family needed, and is last seen in a red cape in the snow. | Jia Yuanchun · Xue Baochai · Zijuan · Grandmother Jia · Miaoyu · Jia Qiaojie · Jia Baoyu |
The frame is not a frame 石頭記
The novel's other title is The Story of a Stone, and the stone is the narrator as well as the hero: the block left unused when the goddess mended the heaven begs a Daoist and a monk to take it into the red dust, and its report of that life is the book. In the earlier incarnation it watered a flower on the bank of the Milky Way; the flower is born a girl owing tears as interest, which is why the cousin's eyes are never dry. The device is not decoration. It makes the whole rise-and-fall of the Jia house a single errand the stone made, and it is why the book keeps interrupting itself with hints that this has already been read through once.
Read that way, the famous slowness of the opening — the family genealogies, the four households who prop each other up, the magistrate who cannot decide a case — is the stone taking stock of the country it means to visit. Chapter 5 is the table of contents, and Baoyu is the only reader in the book who does not understand it.
What a summary cannot carry 所失
Two counts to hold against any synopsis, including the table above. The novel has been indexed at 447 named people, and it is usually counted at nearly forty major characters with over four hundred more; this site paints a leaf for 40 of them and puts the register rows beneath. And the plot is the least of what is there: the book is a household's etiquette, medicine, cookery, taxonomy of estates, and several hundred poems, in a vernacular plain enough that lexicographers later mined it for the vocabulary of modern spoken Chinese. A reader who finishes it remarking that the story was slow is like a visitor to a garden who remarks that the paths were long.
The last sentence is a gloss, not a source. The counts are: the 1986 红楼梦辞典 indexes 447 named characters; the character-number figures and the language claim are from the article cited below.
Where these figures come from 出處
- English Wikipedia, “Dream of the Red Chamber” — text, frame, chapter and character counts, and the 1791 editions (read 30 Sep 2026)
- The Guardian, David Hawkes's obituary — “the complete text has 120 chapters”, and the three volumes of the first 80
- The novel in Chinese, chapter by chapter, at Wikisource