Reminders of my poverty were all about me: the thatched roof, the wicker lattices, the string beds, the crockery stove. But these did not need to be an impediment to the workings of the imagination. Indeed, the beauties of nature outside my door-the morning breeze, the evening dew, the flowers and trees of my garden – were a positive encouragement to write. I might lack learning and literary aptitude, but what was to prevent me from turning it all into a story and writing it in the vernacular? In this way the memorial to my beloved girls could at one and the same time serve as a source of harmless entertainment and as a warning to those who were in the same predicament as myself but who were still in need of awakening.
The question as to whether or not the Bao-yu of the novel is a portrait of the author as a boy will be dealt with later; but certainly this dejected middle-aged man who concludes that the girls he had known in his youth were all ‘morally and intellectually [his] superior’ has a good deal in common with the adolescent who thought that ‘the pure essence of humanity was all concentrated in the female of the species and that males were its mere dregs and off-scourings’, who once observed of his female cousins that ‘if they, whose understanding was so superior, were manifestly still so far from Enlightenment, it was obviously a waste of time for him to go on pursuing it’, and who, when he was a very little boy, used to maintain that ‘girls are made of water and boys are made of mud’, and that only when he was with girls did he feel ‘fresh and clean’.
Whether or not Bao-yu represents the author, the girls in the novel are undoubtedly, in a majority of cases, portraits of the girls he had known in his youth. Quite apart from the author’s own statement as quoted in his brother’s introduction, there are the words spoken by the Stone in his argument with Vanitas in the allegorical opening of the novel’s first chapter: ‘Surely my “number of females”, whom I spent half a lifetime studying with my own eyes and ears, are preferable to this kind of stuff?…’ And if this were not enough, we now have the commentaries of Red Inkstone, drooling in tearful nostalgia over the text: ‘Ah yes. I remember her.’ ‘Yes, there was such a person.’ ‘Yes, it really happened.’ ‘A perfect likeness !’ ‘She was just like that.’ And so on and so forth.
If The Story of the Stone is a sort of Chinese Remembrance of Things Past, it becomes doubly important to us to know as much as we can about the author’s life. Unfortunately what little we know from direct evidence concerns only his last years. Of his childhood and early maturity we know virtually nothing. We do not even know with any certainty either when he was born or who his father was.
Cao Xueqin died on the 12 February 1763, the eve of the Chinese New Year.2 His age at the time is referred to variously as ‘in his forties’ or ‘less than fifty’. These statements, taken in conjunction with what is known of the Cao family’s history a half-century before, make it seem highly probable that he was born in 1715, thus making him forty-eight when he died. His death is said to have been hastened by the loss of his only son a few months before. One of his friends mentions that he left a ‘new wife’ behind, which seems to imply that he was twice married and that the son he lost was his child by the first wife.
As regards appearance, there is a picture believed by some to be a portrait of Cao Xueqin which was painted by a well- known contemporary artist about a year before his death. It shows him reclining on the ground in the midst of a bamboo grove through which a fast-running stream is flowing. He is leaning on a large rock, and his qin (that adjunct of cultured ease as indispensable to the Chinese gentleman as was the lute to his Renaissance counterpart) is lying on another rock a yard or two away with a cloth-wrapped bundle of scrolls beside it. The carefully painted head on its impressionistic, unanatomical body looks for all the world like a photographic cut-out pasted on to a pen-and-wash cartoon. There can be little doubt that it is a genuine portrait, whose ever it is.
It is a large, fat, swarthy, rather heavy face. The eyebrows are high, far apart and downward-sloping, like a clown’s. The eyes are tiny, humorous and twinkling. There is a large, spreading, bulbous, drinker’s nose, a Fu Manchu moustache and a large, rather fleshy mouth. It is an ugly face, but kindly and humorous.
A description by the Manchu critic Yurui written, admittedly, a good few years after Cao Xueqin’s death, but based on statements made by older members of his wife’s family who had known the author personally, says that he was ‘fat, swarthy and of low stature’ – all of which sounds very much like the painting but not at all like the beautiful, moon-faced Bao-yu. Yurui’s informants confirm the portrait’s good humour. A wonderful, witty talker, they call him: ‘Wherever he was, he made it spring.’ There are also contemporary accounts of his holding forth, generally in a loud and excited voice, and particularly if wine could be procured, to a circle of delighted friends.
For about the last six years of his life – perhaps longer – Cao Xueqin was living in the Western Hills outside Peking in considerable poverty. A friend speaks of the whole family living on porridge – though to what extent this was because the money was all being spent on drink would be hard to say. Contemporaries make frequent mention of his heavy drinking and there are references to his obtaining wine on credit or borrowing money to buy it with.3 A. poem by the same friend who mentioned the porridge describes him ‘discoursing of high, noble things while one hand hunts for lice’.
He was a versatile poet and an accomplished painter, specializing – rather appropriately, since ‘rock’ and ‘stone’ are the same word in Chinese – in rock-painting. Selling paintings was his one source of income that we know about. He might, like other impoverished Bannermen, have been receiving a tiny monthly allowance. He may have taught for a short while as a private tutor or schoolmaster. It is also possible that he may have sat for some examination at the age of about forty with a view to obtaining some sort of employment. But these are all conjectures based on the interpretation of cryptic allusions in the verses of his friends.
His friends all knew about his book. They encouraged him to get on with it, even if the freedom to get on with it meant poverty and hardship, and they advised him not to go ‘knocking at rich men’s doors’ and subjecting himself to the constrictions of patronage. They frequently refer to his ‘dream of vanished splendour’, the ‘dream of his old home’, his ‘dream of the South’, and so on. (The novel contains ample evidence that Cao Xueqin spoke like a Southerner. To his dying day he was unable to distinguish between ‘qin’ and ‘qing’.)
What was this ‘vanished splendour’, this ‘old home in the South’ which furnished the material for his’ Dream of Golden Days’?
Until he was thirteen, the age he had reached when the family fortunes crashed, Xueqin lived in Nanking. His family, particularly his grandfather, were important people whose names occur frequently in the official archives of the period and in the writings of their contemporaries. For this reason more is known about some of them than about Xueqin himself. Indeed, so famous was Xueqin’s grandfather Cao Yin, that Xueqin was invariably introduced as ‘Cao Yin’s grandson’, with the result that the name of his father is nowhere to be found.
In order to understand the somewhat peculiar position occupied by the Caos until their dramatic fall in 1728 it is necessary to know something of the Manchu banner system to which they belonged.
The Manchus were a Tungusic people from Manchuria who overthrew the native Chinese dynasty and set up their own ‘Qing’ regime at Peking in 1644. They imposed the ‘pigtail’ on all male Chinese4 and ruled over them, with growing incompetence, until the republican revolution of 1911.
In 1615, when the Manchus were still consolidating their position in Manchuria, they organized their state on military lines under eight ‘banners’, each consisting of so many companies of fighting men together with their families and dependants and having its own landholdings and investments. Later they extended this system to include allied races and defectors from the enemy. In 1634 they established eight Mongol banners and in 1642 eight
Chinese ones.
It used to be thought that the Caos, who were known to be Bannermen but at the same time ethnically Chinese, belonged to this last category, but it is now known that Xueqin’s ancestor, a Chinese colonist in Manchuria, was captured at the fall of Mukden in 1621 and made a slave, or ‘bondservant’, of the Plain White Banner. The Caos were therefore Manchu Bannermen with the status of Bondservant (Manchu böi).
Being enslaved by the Plain White Banner turned out in the event to be a piece of good luck, because this was one of the three ‘Upper Banners’ which later came under the direct control of the Manchu ruler. When the Manchu ruler became the Great Qing Emperor, the Bondservants of these banners were institutionalized as the Imperial Household.
The Manchu conquest of China, particularly of the South, was a slow process extending over many years. At first, though the Manchus’ inadequate command of Chinese pre- vented them from performing many of the more complicated administrative functions by themselves, they distrusted the Chinese bureaucrats whom they were obliged to make use of. At the same time they were deeply distrustful of that other great traditional stand-by of autocratic power in China, the eunuchs. Under the Ming dynasty, which the Manchus overthrew, the eunuchs had wielded enormous power as private instruments of the Emperor, operating outside the control of the normal civil and military agencies; but they had so greatly abused their power that Manchu emperors were wary of using them except in their original capacity of palace servants.
It was in these circumstances that the Bondservants of the Imperial Household came to play an important part. In particular they were employed as Textile Commissioners and Salt Inspectors5 in the great cultural and commercial centres of Nanking, Soochow and Hangchow in the South. A great-grandfather of Cao Xueqin, whose wife had nursed the Emperor Kangxi6 in his infancy, was Textile Commissioner in Nanking from 1663 to 1684. His son Cao Yin was Textile Commissioner in Soochow from 1690 to 1692, and from 1692 until 1728, a period of thirty-six years, Cao Yin and his heirs held the post of Textile Commissioner in Nanking con- tinuously. For much of this time Cao Yin’s brother-in-law Li Xu was Textile Commissioner in Soochow. Li Xu’s sister, who survived Cao Yin by many years, was almost certainly the model for Grandmother Jia in the novel.
The official duties of a Textile Commissioner were to manage the government-owned silk factories, each with their hun- dreds of skilled employees, to purchase the raw materials which supplied them, and to supervise the transport of finished products to the Imperial Court at Peking; but their actual duties were far more numerous. They were in fact the Emperor’s ‘men on the spot’, charged with observing and reporting on the high-ranking officials in their area and keeping him privately informed on a variety of topics ranging from market fluctuations to the weather and amusing local scandal. From time to time they would be given some special com- mission to execute, like purchasing foreign curios or super- vising financial or cultural projects in which the Emperor had become interested. Cao Xueqin’s grandfather, for whom the Emperor Kangxi seems to have had a real affection (he sent him little presents of the new wonder drug, quinine, and fussy notes telling him to look after himself when he was ill) was chosen to supervise the compiling and printing of the huge Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty, comprising nearly fifty thousand poems by more than two thousand poets and still the standard work used by those studying the literature of the period.
Cao Yin acted as host to the Emperor and his vast retinue no less than four times when Kangxi visited Nanking in the course of his celebrated Southern Tours. This involved building a special palace with its own gardens in which to receive him – rather like the Separate Residence made for the Imperial Concubine’s visit in the novel. There is a disguised reference to this in the conversation between Wang Xi-feng and Nannie Zhao in chapter 16.
A commissioner with two or three thousand persons in his employment, handling hundreds of thousands of silver taels a year and sending confidential reports to the Emperor in Peking was a rich and powerful person. Yet men like Cao Yin and his brother-in-law Li Xu, for all their power and magnificence, were still technically the Emperor’s slaves and could be broken by him, immediately and totally, at his whim. Although in the novel the family are disguised as highborn aristocrats whose ancestors were ennobled for their military prowess, something of this terrible vulnerability comes through. Consider the family’s anxiety, amounting to panic, when Jia Zheng is summoned to the Palace in chapter 16, or the cavalier way in which they are treated by the palace eunuchs. In chapter 18 the eunuchs, who are perfectly well aware when the Imperial Concubine will be arriving, allow the entire family, including its aged matriarch, to wait in the street from daybreak, not bothering to inform them, until forced to do so, that their visitor is unlikely to arrive before evening.
Cao Yin was fortunate in retaining the trust and affection of his Imperial master to the end of his life. He had in fact a combination of talents which fitted him almost ideally for his somewhat invidious role. A Manchu of the Manchus, he could ride and shoot with the best. Yet at the same time he was steeped in native Chinese culture. A passable poet, a con- noisseur of fine art, a bibliophile, an amateur playwright who wrote a successful play, From the Maw of the Tiger, about the last days of the Ming dynasty, he was able to win the respect and, in a number of cases, the affection of the cultured Southern gentry, at this period by no means all reconciled to the foreign dynasty. The fall of the Bondservants in the next reign was at least partly due to the fact that the Manchus had themselves become more Chinesified and therefore more acceptable to the Chinese, with the result that these half- Chinese half-Manchu mediators had lost their function.
Under Cao Yin the Cao family attained the peak of its prosperity. The operations he was engaged in required a good deal of financial juggling however – juggling in which the other great Bondservant families played a part. (The court usher’s talk in chapter 4 of the novel about the four great families of Jinling who stood or fell together is a fictionalized representation of this historical fact.) As long as the balls remained in the air all went well enough; but when Cao Yin died in 1712 he left a huge deficit behind him and only an inexperienced nineteen-year-old son to inherit it. It is an indication of Kangxi’s deep regard for his old servant that he allowed Li Xu the means of paying off his deceased brother- in-law’s debts for him and permitted the totally unqualified Cao Yong to inherit his father’s post of Textile Commissioner in Nanking. Not only that, but when Cao Yong, to the utter dismay of the family, died only three years later, he allowed Cao Yin’s nephew Cao Fu, a young man in his early twenties, to be adopted by old Lady Li as Cao Yin’s posthumous ‘son’ and to succeed to the post of Textile Commissioner.
In spite of aid and advice from Li Xu (which may not, however, have been entirely disinterested) the Caos from this time on were in almost continuous trouble financially, and Kangxi’s attitude of amused tolerance towards his youthful Commissioners became at times a little strained. But the real troubles were to begin when Kangxi died in 1722.
The Emperor Yongzheng, who succeeded Kangxi, was an efficient but ruthless and vindictive autocrat. He disliked the Bondservants, suspecting them, with some justification, of dishonesty and incompetence. As informants he despised them, preferring his own highly organized army of secret agents; and as old servants of his father they were under suspicion of being well-disposed towards the princes whom his father had favoured: for Yongzheng had not been expected to succeed the old Emperor and had only done so by means of a coup d’état.
Of Kangxi’s twenty sons it was the fourteenth, Yinti, hero of the Eleuth War and conqueror of Tibet, who was expected to succeed the old Emperor. Unfortunately he was away at the front when his father died, giving Yongzheng in Peking the chance to forestall him. Yet though he spent most of Yong- zheng’s reign in confinement, for some reason it was not on him but on the eighth and ninth brothers, Yinsi and Yintang, that the full weight of the Emperor’s malice descended. Even their names were taken fr
om them. Yinsi was renamed ‘Acina’, which in Manchu means ‘Cur’, and Yintang became ‘Seshe’ or ‘Swine’.
Yongzheng did not at once proceed to extremes against his brothers. They had powerful supporters in the provinces and his doubtful accession made consolidation a necessity. But his dissatisfaction with the Bondservants showed itself immediately. The first to fall was Li Xu, now a man in his sixties. The post of Textile Commissioner in Soochow, which he had held for more than thirty years, was taken from him and his stewardship made the subject of an official inquiry which stripped him of most of his wealth. And though he emerged from his ordeal physically unscathed, he was not to remain at liberty for very long. To the Caos, who in the years since Cao Yin’s death had depended on him so much, his fall must have come as a very great blow, and they must have wondered how long their own turn would be in coming.
The purge of the princes and their followers began less than three years later. In January 1726 Nian Gengyao, a high-ranking official who had played an important part in Yinti’s Tibetan campaign but had subsequently been treated by Yongzheng with pretended favour, was suddenly degraded and impeached on ninety-two counts, some of them very trifling. He was believed to have been corresponding with Yintang (the Swine). Nian himself was allowed to commit suicide, but one of his sons was beheaded and the rest banished to the frontier.