Cao Xueqin (Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in) ca. 1715-1763

Author of Honglou Meng, Cao is considered to be China's greatest novelist, but little is known of his life. An unconventional, versatile man, he came from an eminent and wealthy family which suffered a reversal of fortune in 1728 after the death of the Kangxi Emperor and a power struggle between his sons. Cao seems to have spent about ten years writing and revising his novel, from roughly 1740 to 1750, but the last 40 of the 120 chapters were completed by a different author, probably after his death. He also worked for a period of time in the Imperial Clan's school for the children of the nobility and bannermen, but eventually settled in the countryside west of Peking. He earned some money by selling his own paintings, but his family seems to have been perpetually in poverty. The novel, now generally recognised as a masterpiece, was not published until 1791, nearly 30 years after Cao's death
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Born in the bosom of a wealthy family (was the son of a senior official in the eastern city of Nanjing and Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province today), suffered in his childhood the effects of the unstoppable decline not only their parents, but of the region that had spread up to few years the preponderance of their own. Installed in Beijing when just he was thirteen years of age (1728), he lived surrounded by extreme poverty, which not prevented him from obtaining an excellent cultural background, coupled with his innate literary sensibility, allowed him to be known in literary circles in the capital, where it was well received despite its modest economic situation and the contempt with which it was in official environments