Which of the four great novels should I read first?

Journey to the West if you want jokes and momentum; Red Chamber if you want the masterpiece; Water Margin if you want plot at speed. Three Kingdoms rewards readers who already like history and strategy.

Do I need to read the four novels in order?

No — they share a canon, not a plot. Any one of them is a complete first novel.

Are the four great novels connected?

Only as a shelf: all four read the same world of omens and officialdom, but no storyline carries from one to another.

Which of the four is the longest?

Dream of the Red Chamber — about 2,339 pages of story in English across five volumes. Journey to the West runs 100 chapters; Water Margin and Three Kingdoms 120 each.

Where to start with the Four Great Novels 四大名著讀法

One page for the reader who has heard of the four great Chinese novels and wants to know which one to open first: what each is, how long it runs, and where this site's tools would send you into it.

The four, side by side 四書對照

Novel	Written	What it is	Start here
Water Margin 水滸傳	c. 1400 · 120 ch.	The outlaws' tragedy: 108 stars who take the marsh, win every campaign they are sent on, and are destroyed by the reward.	The 108-star roster, or how it ends
Journey to the West 西遊記	c. 1592 · 100 ch.	A pilgrimage comedy: one monk, three reformed monsters, eighty-one trials, and a scripture that arrives blank.	The demons index, or why the monkey was pinned
Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢	c. 1791 · 120 ch.	The family chronicle: a great house spending itself while its children marry into the wrong futures.	The family tree, or the story in five bands
Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三國演義	c. 1522 · 120 ch.	War and statecraft: forty years of the empire cut three ways, told battle by battle.	The cast & battles tables

How to choose 如何選

Any order works — the four share a shelf, not a storyline, and each is complete on its own. If you want the easiest entry, Journey to the West is the most immediately funny; the deepest is Red Chamber; Water Margin moves fastest.

How long? Each runs past a hundred chapters. Red Chamber in English is the size of five volumes — about 2,339 pages of story — and our length guide does the arithmetic in the open.

Which translation? For Red Chamber see the two aims, Hawkes and the Yangs; for Journey to the West, Waley, Jenner and Yu. Water Margin is best known in Sidney Shapiro's Outlaws of the Marsh.