Secret Copies: Why We Love Pseudo-History on TenTao

Why We Love Pseudo-History

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The man who put it out didn't understand why it caught fire

Almost twenty years ago, the "last twenty-eight chapters" of a Dream of the Red Chamber began to circulate online. The claim: this was an old manuscript preserving Cao Xueqin's original ending, completely different from the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao edition that we're used to reading. Because there is a marginal note in the book saying "the whole book was fair-copied in the twelfth month of Guiyou," people called it the "Guiyou manuscript."

Its last twenty-eight chapters are written brutally, without the little closing note of "orchids and cassia flourishing together" at the end of the Cheng-Gao. Many readers finished it feeling that this is more like the ending Cao Xueqin had in mind.

2,400 Characters

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How I compared

First the method; it's dull, but anyone can redo it.

I have the text of the last 28 chapters of the Guiyou manuscript, the edited text circulating online. On the other side is the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao edition, chapters 81 to 120 of the standard text. I removed the punctuation and marginal notes from both sides, kept only the Chinese characters, and slid a 12-character window across: wherever 12 characters in a row were exactly the same, I marked it. Then I threw out passages that appear only in the first eighty chapters, because both sides have the first eighty and they don't count.

What was left was the overlap unique to the Guiyou manuscript and the last forty chapters of the Cheng-Gao.