A Study Of Version Relationship Between The Handwritten Copy Of A Dream Of Red Mansions Reserved By Rong Geng And The Second Cheng's Edition Of A Dream Of Red Mansions

The Handwritten Copy of A Dream of Red Mansions which has 120 chapters is once reserved by Rong Geng who is a famous ancient philologist and epigrapher.It's a controversial version.In 1920 s,Rong Geng argued with Hu Shi about whether the copy is appeared earlier than or later than 1791.Before this,Hu Shi considered that A Dream of Red Mansions only has 80 chapters at the beginning.It was not until 1791 that there were 120 chapters' version of A Dream of Red Mansions.In other words,Cao Xueqin only created the first eighty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions and the last forty chapters was created by Gao'e.However,after collation,Rong Geng considered that the copy appeared earlier than 1791 and it has 120 chapters.Then,Cao Xueqin created 120 chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions and the last forty chapters was not created by Gao'e.However,Hu Shi considered that the copy was fully copy from the Second Cheng's edition which published in 1792.In 2007,Xia Wei found that the copy put a taboo on emperor Daoguang's name,so we can deduce that the time of the copy appeared not earlier than the first year of Daoguang,that is,1821.In other words,the copy appeared later than 1791.However,It doesn't mean that the master copy of the copy appeared later than 1791.We are still not sure whether the master copy of the copy appeared earlier than or later than 1791.It is still controversial.For the study of A Dream of Red Mansions,it is really a very important issue.It is closely related to the question of the later forty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions.If the master copy of the copy is certainly earlier than 1791,the statement of Gao'e created the later forty chapters of A dream of Red Mansions will collapse of itself and the value of the copy will be immeasurable.Conversely,the value of the copy remains to be discovered.It is also the starting point and foothold of this paper.The paper compare the copy with the early copy of A Dream of Red Mansion and the Cheng's block-printed edition.First,we found that there are lots of difference between the copy and the early copy.It means that there are no direct relationship between them.Second,We found that the copy also differ from the First Cheng's edition and they have no direct relationship as well.Last,we compared the copy with the Second Cheng's edition.We found that the content of the two version is highly similar,even errors are completely identical.Therefore,we can conclude that there is a directly copy relationship between the two version.After analysis of the proofs,we conclude that the copy is directly copied from the Second Cheng's edition.In other words,the master copy of the copy is the Second Cheng's edition and it can't be as early as 1791.