Zhou Ruchang, who has died aged 94, was one of China’s greatest literary scholars, devoting almost seven decades of his life to the study of just one novel: the enigmatic masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber.
Until a week before his death, Zhou was still hard at work, dictating the framework of a new book to his daughter. “My father did not care about fame and he did not fear death,” she said. “The only thing he could not let go of was this book.”
The Dream of the Red Chamber, a sprawling and allegorical portrait of life during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), is China’s greatest novel, a
work so multi-layered and allusive it has spawned its own field of scholarship: “Redology”.
Zhou was perhaps China’s most famous Redologist, and his 1953 book,New Evidence on the Dream of the Red Chamber, drew on 1,000 sources, and research inside government archives and at the Forbidden City, to put together a portrait of the book’s author, Cao Xueqin, and his family.
Zhou’s scholarship brought him to the attention of China’s then new leader, Mao Tse-tung, who claimed to be such a fan of the novel that he had read it five times.
Cao was descended from a Chinese bondservant who had been a favourite of the Emperor Kangxi (1654-1722), and his family had lived in high style in Nanjing. But the Cao family fell from grace under the subsequent rule of Emperor Yongzheng and had its property confiscated.
On the surface, his novel, thought to be semi-autobiographical, paints the lives and loves of two families during the Qing dynasty, presenting a cast of some 40 major characters and almost 500 minor ones.
The novel was unfinished when Cao died in 1763, and for several decades it circulated in manuscript form among his family and friends before being published, with a number of additional chapters (possibly edited or written by subsequent hands), in 1792.
Zhou wrote more than 50 books about the novel, one of which was a 10-volume edition of textual analysis of the various manuscripts.
The critic Anthony West said that the novel is to the Chinese “very much what The Brothers Karamazov is to Russian and Remembrance of Things Past is to French literature” and that it is “beyond question one of the great novels of all literature”.
Born in Tianjin on April 14 1918, Zhou was the youngest of five brothers. His father was a scholar and had been a government official in the seaside city.
He was a shy but able student and had a passion for carpentry, constructing his own book cases. He later said his devotion to Dream of the Red Chamber stemmed from his mother’s habit of reading it to him when he was a child.
At high school he volunteered for the army, but his student brigade was dismissed, out of concern for its safety when a real war, with Japan, loomed.
Instead, he studied English literature first at Yenching University and then, in 1947, at Peking University, where his translations of Shelley’s poetry impressed Qian Zhongshu, the author of Fortress Besieged, a tale of middle-class life in the 1930s that is considered a masterpiece of Chinese 20th-century fiction.
Zhou’s wife, Mao Shuren, recalled that he was such a passionate poet that he would ask her to name a topic and then spontaneously compose verse. He later moved to teach at Sichuan University before transferring to the Chinese National Academy of Arts.
In 1968, during the febrile anti-intellectualism of the Cultural Revolution, he was imprisoned in a cowshed and then sent the following year to watch over a vegetable patch in Hubei province. By 1970, however, he had been rehabilitated and transferred back to Beijing.
By then, his already poor eyesight was all but lost, and he wrote in large, overlapping characters or dictated his work. In later life, when he appeared on television to discuss Dream of the Red Chamber, he used no notes because he could not read them. Nevertheless, his enthusiasm for learning was undimmed. Zhou said with his poor sight and hearing he had become adept at introspection and contemplation.
Ronald Gray, an American scholar of the book, said he had contacted Zhou last year to let him know about Robert Morrison, a Protestant missionary who in 1823 had spirited seven copies of Dream of the Red Chamber to England.
“I very quickly got a response [from Zhou] that was positively dripping with excitement. He had a host of questions, and keep in mind that he was 93 at the time,” he said. “Whenever I visited him, he would, at times, become so excited about the novel that his daughter, who took care of him and was his personal secretary, had to tell him to slow down.”
Despite his literary fame, Zhou lived modestly in a small apartment in Beijing with his three daughters, who survive him. He requested no funeral service. “I have lived a life with no regrets,” he said on his deathbed.
Zhou Ruchang, born April 14 1918, died May 31 2012
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