Honglou Meng and Agrarian Values

This paper analyzes how Cao Xueqin subjects the conventional idealization of farmers, farming, and land ownership to a systematic and trenchant critique in Honglou meng. In this paper, I argue that the novel offers a different view of the agrarian that does not owe its inspiration to the ascendant commercial interests of his times. In the sustained critical stance that Cao’s novel adopts toward agrarian values and in the radically different alternative that it upholds, Honglou meng strikes a distinctive note not only in Ming-Qing fiction but also in the entire premodern Chinese literary tradition.