This is the great classic of Chinese literature, the most famous novel of a literature almost three thousand years old, and, as Borges stated, an imperishable book. The beautiful and tragic story of the love affairs of Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu in eighteenth-century China, in the twilight of a feudal splendor that is no longer more than a dream, not only constitutes a range of all human passions, in which sweetness and cruelty intertwine, but is at the same time a dazzling chronicle of the chiaroscuro of the society and culture of imperial China. Every word has cost me a drop of blood, said Cao Xueqin. Since the novel began to circulate in China in handwritten copies that were sold in fairs and markets after Cao Xueqin's death, when he was barely forty years old and destitute, The Dream of the Red Chamber has become one of the fundamental works of universal literature.