Xueqin Cao

Cáo Xuěqín was a Chinese writer during the Qing dynasty. He is best known as the author of Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. His given name was Cáo Zhān and his courtesy name was Mèngruǎn.

Cao Xueqin was born to a Han Chinese clan that was brought into personal service  to the Manchu royalty in the late 1610s. His ancestors distinguished themselves through military service in the Plain White Banner of the Eight Banners and subsequently held posts as officials which brought both prestige and wealth.

After the Plain White Banner was put under the direct jurisdiction of the Qing emperor, Cao's family began to serve in civil positions of the Imperial Household Department.

During the Kangxi Emperor's reign, the clan's prestige and power reached its height. Cao Xueqin's grandfather, Cao Yin was a childhood playmate to Kangxi while Cao Yin's mother, Lady Sun was Kangxi's wet nurse. Two years after his ascension, Kangxi appointed Cao Xueqin's great-grandfather, Cao Xi as the Commissioner of Imperial Textiles in Jiangning and the family relocated there.

Almost no records of Cao's early childhood and adulthood have survived. Redology scholars are still debating Cao's exact date of birth, though he is known to have been around forty to fifty at his death. Cao Xueqin was the son of either Cao Fu or Cao Yong. It is known for certain that Cao Yong's only son was born posthumously in 1715; some Redologists believe this son might be Cao Xueqin. In the clan register ,however, Cao Yong's only son was recorded as a certain Cao Tianyou Further complicating matters for Redologists is the fact that neither the names Cao Zhan nor Cao Xueqin—names that his contemporaries knew him by—can be traced in the register.

Most of what we know about Cao was passed down from his contemporaries and friends. Cao eventually settled in the countryside west of Beijing where he lived the larger part of his later years in poverty selling off his paintings. Cao was recorded as an inveterate drinker. Friends and acquaintances recalled an intelligent, highly talented man who spent a decade working diligently on a work that must have been Dream of the Red Chamber. "Born in the prosperous, finally degenerate." Cao Xueqin's family fate has changed from the status like blooming of flowers to the state of decline, making him deeply experience the sorrow of life and the ruthlessness of the world, and also get rid of the mundanity and narrowness of his original social class. The trend of decadence also brought disillusionment and sentimentality. His tragic experience, his poetic emotion, his spirit of exploration, and his sense of innovation are all cast into "Dream of the Red Chamber". They praised both his stylish paintings, particularly of cliffs and rocks, and originality in poetry, which they likened to Li He's. Cao died some time in 1763 or 1764, leaving his novel in a very advanced stage of completion . He was survived by a wife after the death of a son.