"Cao Xueqin, With The Wei-jin Demeanour, Wrote The Great Romance"

In the period of Wei-Jin and Southern and Northern dynasties, society and polity was unrest, powerful families became bigger, royal authority was to be eroded, ethical order was destroyed, legitimate morals was being suspected, Confucianism became faint, Wei Jin metaphysics rose, buddhism and taoism appeared, due to those factors joint influence on the Wei-Jin people’s idea of life and spirit, there formed a celebrities’ manners in Wei-Jin period, it’s called Wei-Jin characters’strength. The famous people were always indulgent and uninhibited, excessive drinking, taking drugs, chatting each other, but they had created the most romantic and legendary time in Chinese literary history and became a model for later literati admired.A Dream of Red Mansions (HLM), the pinnacle of Chinese classical novels, is deeply and obviously strengthened by the Wei-Jin characters. It had been indicated early that Cao Xueqin was deeply influenced by Ruan Ji and Ji Kang, and set up a contrast between HLM figures and Wei-Jin celebrities. However, the articles that researched both of them for further scrutiny is no more, and usually are some words of annotation criticism and be lack of demonstration and systematically summarizing.The paper’s part one will describe what is Wei-Jin characters’strength, we analysis and conclude the two groups of opposite relations on talent and emotion, appearance and spirit under this life mode, and then briefly discussing the characters’talent, emotion, appearance and spirit in the Wei-Jin people and HML.The chapter two expounds the Wei-Jin characters’strength mirroring on the author of Cao Xueqin himself. By the modern Redology new study about Cao Xueqin’s life experience and character peculiarity through the poem of his close friends (like Dun cheng, Dun min and Zhang Yiquan), we could just make out that Wei-Jin characters’ strength has a great effection on Cao.The chapter three is the most important part of the paper and contains sis sections that will analyze sequentially the Wei-Jin characters’ strength which be hidden in six key person of the HLM, they are Master bao, Miss Lin, Shi Xiangyun, Miss Bao, Miss Tanchun and Miao-yu. According to the figure description we take a way of combining contents and historical data to probe into the lives, entertainment, emotion, thinking and other aspects of every characters in novel, and to explore how the people’s character create and the origin of thoughts in spirit Especially section of Miss Bao and Miss Tanchun, it’s unlike the previous image of the status of Confucianism criticized by Redologists, we would find out their hidden character strength of Wei-Jin.By comparing with Essays and Criticism and The Four Books, Chapter four makes a thorough inquiry for the most direct evidence about the Wei-Jin characters’strength in HLM from vocabulary and story at a micro level, furthermore, rise to a higher level of philosophy and aesthetics and dissect a deeper case for the Wei-Jin impact from the two interrelated sides of "awaking of human" and "tragedy of aesthetic".