Dream of Red Mansions is a book full of mysteries, and readers and researchers are willing to seek answers to these puzzles, and there is a thriving "Red Studies". There is a category of issues that are debated endlessly in Red Studies that objectively exist but are still difficult to solve, such as the life experience of the author of "Dream of Red Mansions", whether the original book was written only 80 times or more, etc.; there is a category of red scholars who create topics to entertain themselves, and it is impossible to have a positive answer, such as Cao Xueqin's relics, such as portraits, which are sometimes "discovered", and finally verified, either to deceive themselves or to be crowned by Li Dai; and there is also a category of phenomena that are not understood in the book, which could have been clearly explained but have never been reasonably explained, such as Cheng Jiaben and Cheng Yiben The text differences of "Dream of Red Mansions", etc.
"Dream of Red Mansions" was written in the middle of the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, and was originally called "The Story of the Stone", and only manuscripts have been circulated. In the winter of the 56th year of Qianlong (1791), presided over by Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E, the book was typeset by the Cui Book House with movable type, entitled "Dream of Red Mansions", which is known as Cheng Jiaben by today's people. After a lapse of 70 days, the Cui Book House revised Cheng Jia's book and typeset and published it again, which was Cheng Yi's book. Cheng A and Cheng B were the first to be printed and published "Dream of Red Mansions", which played a huge role in the dissemination and popularization of the book. Cheng Jia, Cheng B has become a precious ancient book, in 2008, there is a Cheng A book in the auction, the transaction price is as high as more than 2 million yuan.
Beginning in the fifties of the twentieth century, Cheng Jiaben and Cheng Yiben were photocopied and published one after another, and the more books researchers saw, the greater the doubts in their minds: on the one hand, several Cheng Jiaben of the same edition, none of which were identical in text, and all of them were more or less different; on the other hand, Cheng Jiaben and Cheng Yiben were obviously two editions, and some pages were printed in the same edition. How can we explain this phenomenon? Over the past several decades, there have been many discussions in the Red academic circles, and the widely popular view is that the book editions of Cheng A and Cheng B's "Dream of the Red Chamber" have not been dismantled, but have been preserved and printed for a long time, causing all kinds of problems. Mr. Du Chungeng, who specializes in collecting various editions of "Dream of Red Chambers", expounded this view most comprehensively, and in his article "Cheng Jia, Cheng B, and Their Different Versions", he believes that the difference in the text of Cheng Jia's book is caused by the change of words and modification of the movable type version at any time; He believes that the wooden movable type version does not have to be disassembled and rearranged after printing more than 100 copies, but can be used continuously for a very long time, as evidenced by Cheng Yin's Dream of Red Mansions.
In fact, this view is plausible, because it is contrary to common sense from the perspective of printing and publishing. People choose wooden movable type to print books, mainly focusing on saving costs and improving efficiency: movable type is reused, and a small amount of movable type can print a large number of words, which is relatively economical and convenient for engraving. For example, if a Dream of Red Mansions has 800,000 words, printing two versions is 1.6 million words, and with the movable type version, as long as 100,000 movable types are prepared, the task can be completed well, and after printing, these movable types can be used to print more books. If you use engraving, you need to engrave 1.6 million words, and the cost of wood and lettering is at least ten times that of movable type, and the time required is much more than that of engraving 100,000 words and then typesetting. If it is really as the red scholar said, the typesetting of the two "Dream of Red Mansions" is not disassembled, and it is necessary to carve 1.6 million words out of wood, and then sawn them down one by one, and then put them together into a whole page, not to mention a lot of useless work, and it takes far more money and time than engraving, no one will act like this. And judging from the situation at that time, it was impossible for a bookstore to have so many movable types. Emperor Qianlong was rich in the world, and the palace used a collector's edition to print books, but there were 250,000 inscriptions. For general private printing, the scale of 100,000 movable type is already very large. In addition, for a big book like "Dream of Red Mansions", there are thousands of editions in two books, how many rooms does a bookstore have to put them properly?
Therefore, it is impossible for the typography of "Dream of Red Mansions" not to be disassembled. In fact, the book has provided us with a large amount of unequivocal evidence of dismantling, such as the "Dream of Red Mansions" character with the damaged character "dream" in the attached picture (left), which is repeated many times in the book. The reuse of movable type is irrefutable evidence of disassembly and rearrangement. Not only that, Cheng Yiben was also typeset with the same set of movable type after the dismantling of Cheng Jia's book edition, and the evidence is that the characters used in Cheng Jia's book appear in Ben B again, such as the word "dream" with the same defect in the attached picture (right).
Since the reasons found by the red scholars do not make sense, how can we explain the phenomenon of discrepancies in Cheng Jiaben's writings? In fact, the answer is very simple, and this question cannot be called a "mystery." When a typo is found in the printed leaves, the edition has been removed and cannot be modified, so a errata can only be printed for readers to cut it out and paste it for correction. In fact, this is also a common practice of movable type, including modern lead type printing. There are also readers who find mistakes, write the orthography with a pen, and also stick it on top of the typo. The National Library, the Peking University Library, and the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have used this method to correct mistakes, but some people use the engraved characters provided by the errata table, and some people use the written characters, and the changes are inconsistent, resulting in discrepancies in the characters. In the early years, red scholars studied "Dream of Red Mansions" based on photocopies, but there were no traces of pasting and alteration from the photocopies, and mistakenly thought that the text discrepancies were caused by typographing. In recent years, red scholars have also noticed the affixing and alteration of Cheng's prints, but it seems that no one has used errata to explain the above questions, which is a little regrettable.
As for the use of common book leaves by Cheng Jiaben and Cheng B, the situation is more complicated, it should be that after Cheng Jiaben was bound into a book, there were still some unfinished book leaves, and the publisher put them into separate packs when reprinting the second book in order to save costs. In addition to correcting the typos in the first book according to the errata, the second version also made some changes to the text, but there is a peculiar phenomenon, that is, no matter how much deletion and major changes, the beginning and end of the number of words in each leaf are unchanged, which can be connected with the upper and lower leaves of the second book, and can also be connected with the upper and lower leaves of the first book, obviously, this is to make use of the arrangement made by the leaves of the first book. The rest of the leaves of the first book are outnumbered, and the second version is somewhat different, so that the content of the second book is difficult to be consistent with different processes. This phenomenon of the mixture of A and B was formed in the binding process of Dream of Red Mansions, which has nothing to do with printing, and there is no possibility of "staggered printing plates".
Movable type reused in Cheng's typesetting
This article is excerpted with permission from Ai Junchuan's "Living and Reading", Guangxi Normal University Press.