Ripening Peaches: A Complete Collection of The Story of the Stone (3 Volumes)

Author: Cao Xueqin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-04-01
Features: This book is the result of over a decade of effort by Mr. Zheng Qingshan, with standardized editing and operations, meticulous and comprehensive revisions, making it one of the best editions close to Cao Xueqin's original work. The book uses the earliest extant Zhi Ping manuscripts—Jia Xu, Yi Mao, and Geng Chen—as its base texts. For the 64th and 67th chapters, the Lie Cang manuscript is used as the base text, and it is comprehensively collated and verified against ten other manuscripts. The collation follows the principle of removing falsehoods and preserving truth, with the standards of preserving authenticity, following consensus, and choosing the best wording for revisions. The four methods of collation proposed by Mr. Chen Yuan—direct comparison, internal comparison, external comparison, and rational comparison—are used. Notably, some difficult and previously uncorrected textual issues have been revised. Important revised texts are accompanied by collation notes, appended at the end of each chapter. The last forty chapters are included as an appendix using the Cheng Jia manuscript held by the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Additionally, an appendix of Zhi Ping annotations on the missing last thirty chapters of Cao Xueqin's work is provided for readers to compare.