Do you know how the last forty chapters of "Dream of Red Mansions" were "lost"?
In the 19th year of Qianlong's reign, a piece of news shocked Xishan Mourning Hongxuan: the man in the Forbidden City had set his sights on the "Xianshu" written by Cao Xueqin. The staff sneered in the memorial - What a treasure mirror, it is clearly a demon mirror, reflecting the Dragon Throne of the Qing Dynasty!
That night, the candles flickered until dawn. Cao Xueqin, Zhi Yanzhai, Kong Shangren, the former Ming Dynasty clan, and the inspector of the Ministry of Internal Affairs... This group of people who could not sit together made the craziest decision in history: they burned the last forty chapters of the one hundred and twenty chapters.
It wasn't a fire, it wasn't lost, it was burned by themselves.
But this is where the real madness begins. In the next ten years, this group of "madmen" did an even more incredible thing - they took the burned "anti-poems", "secret history" and "head-off ending", word for word, re-opened, scattered, and encrypted them, and spent five or ten years sewing them into every line of poetry, every gossip, and every look in the first eighty chapters.
From then on, there were only eighty chapters of "A Dream of Red Mansions" in the world. No one knew that this "broken copy" contained a complete book of mourning for a civilization, and no one knew that Cao Xueqin was not alone. Behind him stood the last cultural desperadoes of the entire era.
Three hundred years later, there was a thunder in the Western Mountains, and an iron letter was ripped out. The "evidence" written with blood inkstones, secret letters, and invisible potion inside finally brought this "undercover civilization crossing" spanning the Kangxi, Yongzong and Qianlong dynasties to light.
Open this book and you will experience for yourself: how a group of people burned manuscripts to survive and guarded their souls with incompleteness in the literary prison.
