"Death is not blind." On the first day of the first lunar month in 1764, Cao Xueqin lay on a broken table at home, leaving her last words. At this time, there was no more food at home.
"Duyun is stupid, who understands the taste."
This is a sentence written by Cao Xueqin for the classical masterpiece "Dream of Red Mansions".
In fact, Cao Xueqin spent her whole life working for the dream of the Red Mansion.
In his writing, Jia Fu was prominent for a while, whether it was Jia Baoyu or those around him, they were exhausted and clothed, and they enjoyed endless glory and wealth.
However, in reality, Cao Xueqin was poor and sick, and eventually died alone.
"Dream of Red Mansions" is a realistic novel, although the author claims that the background of the dynasty is completely empty and has no evaluation in real history, but relevant scholars believe that the background of the creation of Dream of Red Mansions is China during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
In that case, why did Cao Xueqin "hide the real thing and then save it in false words"?
Since the Qing rulers were the upper aristocracy of the Manchus, since the Qing army entered the customs, the emperors of the Qing Dynasty exercised tight control over the field of literature out of political needs, and by the Qing generation, the rulers created many "literary prisons".
In order to avoid these risks, Cao Xueqin had to adopt this special writing method.
As it turned out, this did not have much effect, because the Cao family had a prominent position and was beyond the reach of others.
As we all know, Cao Xueqin's grandfather was named Cao Yin, and there was a layer of "small" relationship between him and the Kangxi Emperor.
Kangxi was a sentimental emperor, and after Cao Yin suffered from dysentery, he specially called the special medicine in the court to give Cao Yin, but unfortunately, due to the long distance, Cao Yin did not wait for the imperial medicine to arrive, and he had already died.
In order to make up for the debt in his heart, and in order to give the descendants of the Cao family a place to settle down, the Kangxi Emperor appointed the children of the Cao family to be the weaving of Jiangning, which is a fat shortage, it is a gate for the emperor to buy dragon robes, whether it is procurement or production, there is a lot of oil and water to fish.
To use a sentence in "Dream of Red Mansions", the Cao family at this time can really be described as "fire cooking oil, flowers blooming with brocade." ”
However, after careful examination, the Cao family already showed some signs of defeat.
Because the Kangxi Emperor stayed in the Cao family on many southern tours, plus the poor management of the Cao Mansion itself, by the time of the Kangxi Emperor's later years, the Cao family owed the treasury a lot of silver taels.
The Kangxi Emperor looked at Cao Yin, who had been dead for many years, and adopted the strategy of "turning a blind eye" to the Cao family, which he never dealt with.
In the sixty-first year of the Kangxi Dynasty, the emperor died and the new monarch Yongzheng ascended the throne. Although Yongzheng and Kangxi are father and son, their personalities are completely different.
If the Kangxi Emperor treated the Cao family quite kindly, Yongzheng was not so polite.
As soon as he ascended the throne, he clearly declared: "I can't be as tolerant as the emperor today", which means that I must not be too good for you like my father!
In the sixth year of the Yongzheng Dynasty, the Cao family was raided. This year, Cao Xueqin was still a fourteen-year-old teenager.
If life is like a roller coaster with ups and downs, then the year of fourteen years old was the top of Cao Xueqin's life, and since then, he has begun to walk "downhill" and has not recovered his former glory in his life.
Due to a shortage of funds, Cao Xueqin had to move, and he came to his new home in the western suburbs of the capital and began to write Dream of the Red Mansion.
At first, Cao Xueqin did not expect that the book he wrote could have such a high reputation, he just circulated it in his "circle of friends".
However, the Red Mansion spread in this way, so that later, there was such a sentence in the capital: "If you don't talk about the dream of the Red Mansion, it will be futile to read all the poetry books!"
The meaning of this sentence is that even if you read a lot of books, if you don't know anything about the Red Chamber, you can't be considered a qualified reader.
Since Emperor Wudi of Han established the orthodox status of Confucianism, Confucian classics have become the supreme existence in the minds of readers, and the influence of the dream of the Red Chamber can be seen in such praise.
However, the manuscript of Dream of Red Mansions was lost in the process of circulation, and in the current version, only the first eighty times were written by Cao Xueqin, and the last forty "sequels" were not recognized by the world in most cases because they were too far from the original artistic conception.
There have been various theories about why the original Dream of the Red Chamber was lost, one of which is that it was artificially destroyed because of the metaphor in the book "taboo".
If that's the case, it will be an eternal deficiency for Cao Xueqin herself and for the "red fan".
Cao Xueqin's pain is more than that.
It turned out that Cao Xueqin's wife had given him a son, which made him very happy, but the good times did not last long, and this child, who was placed in high hopes by his father, actually walked in front of Cao Xueqin.
Therefore, when Cao Xueqin dies, she will shout: "I will not die blind!" At this time, he had no more food at home, so he was so down.
And he also left this world with regrets.
This sigh can only be understood by those who have experienced it firsthand. #历史开讲 #
Resources:
"The Legend of Cao Xueqin"
