Part 2 - Background of Dream of the Red Chamber

Cao Yin’s Life as one of the Richest Men in China

(Scene from the Chinese TV series Dream of the Red Mansions, 2010)

See Part 1 here.

By 1699, with his father having run the Nanjiang Silk factory for 20 years - making tons of silver - and after himself having run the Suzhou silk factory for three years, and the Nanjiang silk factory for six years - Cao Yin was one of the richest men in China.

What did Cao Yin do with his incredible wealth?

1. He hosted the Kangxi Huangdi (Emperor) when he came south to visit this part of his empire. Cao Yin hosted his friend and ruler four times: 1699, 1703, 1705, & 1707. Each visit was extremely expensive for the host. Cao Yin had a small palace built next to the silk factory for Kagnxi to live in. The small palace had to be built to very high standards in terms of workmanship and materials. Cao Yin had to give gifts to the Huangdi, feed him and his entourage, and house all the various friends, wives, and attendants who were accompanying Kangxi on his tours of inspection. Cao Yin also had to provide for entertainment for the ruler: opera companies, singers, dancers, circus artists, poets, and scholars. All of this would have cost hundreds of thousands of taels of silver.

2. The Kangxi Huangdi asked Cao Yin to publish books. These officially commissioned books were created with the highest quality possible. Cao Yin set up a book publishing business in Yangzhou, very close to Nanjing. The books were printed using hand-carved blocks of wood, one or two pages per block of wood. Note: no matter how carefully you ink and press the paper onto the wood block, after each pressing, the wood loses some of it’s edges and so the wood blocks were usually thrown away after 1,000 books were printed. [Metal type wears down also but since you can cast metal type in a mold, when a metal letter needs to be replaced you melt it down and recast it.] One of the books Cao Yin’s company produced was a comprehensive collection of Tang Dynasty poetry, with more 48,000 poems from 2,200 authors. This was an enormous project but Cao Yin produced 10-15 more books as well, including several dictionaries. These were very expensive undertakings, though likely not as expensive as hosting the Huangdi.

3. Cao Yin built a massive garden, made famous because it was described in detail by his grandson, Cao Xueqin in the novel Dream of the Red Chamber. This garden had several houses, a small lake, a river, hundreds of trees and it took an enormous amounts of money to maintain. When the family lost its wealth in 1728, the garden had to be rebuilt by its next owner, a Chinese scholar-official named Yuan Mei (d. 1798). Sadly, this garden was utterly demolished when the Taiping seized control of Nanjing in 1859.

To help pay for all of this work, Kangxi granted Cao Yin control over the salt works of Yangzhou in 1704, 1706, 1708, and 1710. Despite all the income from the salt works and the silk factory, when Cao Yin died in 1712 (10 years before Kangxi died), he owed the government more than 580,000 taels of silver! In fact, the exact amount of money Cao Yin’s family owed to Kangxi remained murky for the next 15 years.

Cao Yin’s Garden Inspired the Yuanming Yuan Garden

The most famous garden in Chinese history was/is the Yuanming Yuan northeast of Beijing. The Yuanming Yuan was started by the Kangxi Huangdi in 1707 and it was expanded and improved by later Huangdi for the next 100 years. It is clear to me that Kangxi was inspired to build the Yuanming Yuan because of his extended visits with Cao Yan in Nanjing in the years 1699 to 1707.

Cao Yin’s garden featured a lake, streams of water large enough for a boat to sail on, and several different houses, each with its own theme and architecture. The Yuanming Yuan which Kangxi built was larger and more grand but the use of water to separate different parts of the garden was apparently copied from Cao Yin - and it was quite the engineering feat given that Beijing is much drier than Nanjing. (The Wikipedia article claims that the “rivers” of the Yuanming Yuan were actually built by the Yongzhen Huangdi. I doubt this is true.)

To be sure, Cao Yin’s garden was itself inspired by older gardens in Suzhou and Hongzhou. However, my guess is that Cao Yin’s garden was the largest and most water-focused garden in China in 1700. I’m sure other Chinese experts have noticed the connection between Cao Yin’s garden and the Yuanming Yuan but I’ve never seen the connection pointed out before.

I wonder how Cao Yin’s garden supervisors kept the mosquitos in check? I think the Yuanming Yuan would have had the same problem, on an even larger scale.

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The Fall of the Cao Family

Cao Yin died in 1712 and his son Cao Yong took over as head of the Nanjing silk factory, however, Cao Yong died unexpectedly just two years later in 1715. Kangxi allowed one of Cao Yin’s other sons (or a nephew) named Cao Fu, to take over the Nanjing silk factory but the fiancees were in a chaotic mess. Cao Fu struggled for ten years to maintain what his grandfather had built, running the silk works while making enough money to keep the huge estate going. To make ends meet, Cao Fu seems to have borrowed additional money from the government.

Kangxi died at the end of 1722 and his successor, the Yongzheng Huangdi took control over China. Yongzheng spent the early years of his rule getting rid of wasteful expenses and eliminating most of his brothers and quite a number of powerful friends of his father. The new Huangdi seems to have had little connection to the Cao family and he eventually concluded that Cao Fu wasn’t worth supporting.

In 1727 Yongzhen decided enough was enough and he put Cao Fu in jail for financial mismanagement of the Nanjing silk factory. He ordered the Cao family to hand over all their remaining lands to his government (12 houses and a thousand acres of land). The Huangdi claimed that the Cao family owed the government a debt of 31,000 taels of silver - even after everything was they owned was seized. The Cao family were allowed to live in one of their houses in Beijing but they had little income. Cao Fu was released after a year in prison however it appears he was unable to make much money from 1730 till his death.

Cao Xueqin - the Writer

We know the name of the man who wrote Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin. He was a member of the Cao family but we do not know if Cao Xueqin was the son of Cao Yong (who died in 1715) or Cao Fu (who died around 1750).

In the novel, the Dream of the Red Chamber, there are two brothers who jointly manage the family estate which had been created by their father. The main character in the novel, a young man age 14-15, is enjoying life at the apex of society. It seems most likely to me that Cao Xueqin was the posthumous son of Cao Yong which would explain why the main character has - in effect - two fathers - though one of the two brothers plays almost no role in the story.

As a result of the Cao family’s dramatic financial reverse in 1727, Cao Xueqin lived the rest of his life (from age 14 till his death in 1765) in a state of genteel poverty. Despite a superb education, Cao Xueqin was unable to pass the Imperial Exam. After his family lost favor with the Huangdi, it seems relatively few people were interested in associating with Cao Xueqin. He lived in Beijing, married an unknown woman, and spent more than a decade of his life writing a fictional account of his life as a young man, when he was on top of the world.

Cao Xueqin’s only son died in 1763 and Xueqin died about a year later, leaving his novel incomplete at his death.