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Honglou meng ying and its Publisher, Juzhen tang of Beijing

Published in 1877, the novel Honglou meng ying by the celebrated poet and painter Gu Chun (zi Taiqing,1799–1877), may be the first extant novel ever authored by a Chinese woman. Gu Taiqing’s fascinating biography is not the subject of this paper. Suffice it to say that she was a Manchu of the trimmed blue banner and the Xilin (or Xilinjueluo) clan and that she spent her adult years in Beijing. Gu’s involvement with Honglou meng ying is conveyed initially by a pen name, Yuncha waishi, or Cloud Raft Immortal. The story of how this connection was lost from view and then recovered is of some interest. Not until the late nineteen eighties was it securely established that the book was by Gu Taiqing. This identification was based on a missing section of her writings that was preserved only in Japan. Gu Taiqing’s two other published works, Tianyou ge ji and Donghai yu ge, are both collections of poetry. Both circulated in manuscript for decades, and some partial manuscript versions even bear her own annotations. These were first published decades after her death, in the early twentieth century. Several juan of the manuscript version of Tianyou ge ji, long held in Japan, were lost in China. These provided the clue