A Study On The Sports Culture Of A Dream Of Red Mansions

Although the term “sports” is an exotic of Chinese modern society, a variety of physical activities had a long history in ancient China. As a special social phenomenon of human being’s history, sports is a purposeful social activity, which is used for human’s social needs such as their productive labor and living, and human body’s physiological and psychological needs. The essence of sports is culture, and it is mankind’s unique social cultural phenomenon. Therefore sports culture is an extension of sports in other cultural forms and styles, and an integration of various cultures. This is reflected in many Chinese classical literary works, and A Dream of Red Mansions is one of the typical representatives.This paper takes A Dream of Red Mansions with 120 chapters, which was published by the People’s Literature Publishing House in 2008, for the research text, and analyzes the sports games that was recorded by this book. This paper uses research methods such as text analysis, document literature and logical analysis, and the author does a comprehensive research on the physical activities described in this book from the perspective of cultural analysis. The author strives to explore the cultural connotation of physical activities in this book and broaden the researching approach of Red Mansions culture.The first part of this paper is a review, which gives the reason for selecting this subject, defines the basic concepts and investigates the research status. The second part establishes the defining standard of the physical activities in A Dream of Red Mansions; it investigates and counts the five kinds of activities including military arts, disciplining temperament, folk traditions, leisure activities and entertainment games which were mentioned in this book, and it counts nineteen physical activities such as horsemanship, archery and the chess of go; it also introduces the participants and explores the history and origins of these activities. The third part investigates the description and setting of physical activities of this book, and analyzes the characteristics presented by the distribution situation, which appears more in the first eighty chapters and in the garden but less in the other forty chapters and in the outside of the garden. And it also shows a characteristic of proper details and summaries and real detailed description, this plays a role in developing the plot, shaping the characters and predicting the fate of the family for writing the whole book. The fourth part is the key and main part of the study; it intends to explore sports cultural characteristics shown in this book, including five aspects, history culture, national culture, folk culture, female culture and aristocratic culture. In the last part, this paper summarizes the value of sports culture that is formed in the work of A Dream of Red Mansions, and it concludes that its sports cultural thoughts have an influence and practical significance for the later generations.