Precious Stone, Noble Bones

Precious Stone, Noble Bones

The "Tombstone Inscription of Cao Xueqin," though rough, is all the more valuable as it provides conclusive proof that the globally celebrated writer and author of *Dream of the Red Chamber*, Cao Xueqin, was laid to rest in Zhangjiawan, east of Beijing.

In the late autumn of 1968, while leveling the ground within a earthen enclosure located at the southwest corner of the 600-acre leased land of the Cao family, south of the Xiao Taihou River and west of Zhangjiawan town, a foundation stone slab was unearthed. Alongside the slab, the skeletal remains of a male were also discovered. Li Jingzhu, the leader of the Fourth Production Team, informed everyone at the time that the stone slab was Cao Xueqin’s tombstone. Thinking they had found the burial site of a notable figure, people began digging wildly in search of a coffin. Aside from the skeleton, nothing else was found. Someone even picked up the skull and violently banged it against the handle of a bulldozer shovel, hoping a pearl would fall out of its mouth—only black dirt emerged. Frustrated, they pushed the scattered bones along with the dirt into the river to fill a low-lying area. Later that evening, Li Jingzhu transported the unearthed slab to his home, cleaned it, and used six sheets of standard 8-page office paper to pencil-rub the inscriptions on the stone, which he kept hidden until this day. The following spring, when Li’s family was building a house, they used the tombstone as part of the foundation. In the spring of 1992, when renovating their old house, the family accidentally damaged and destroyed the bottom right corner of the stone. In July, Li Jingzhu handed over the tombstone to the town government for safekeeping. In August, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Cultural Relics organized historians and archaeological experts to examine and authenticate the stone, officially naming it the "Tombstone Inscription of Cao Xueqin."

The stone measures 100 centimeters in length, 40 centimeters in width, and 12 centimeters in thickness. On the front, in the center and running vertically, are engraved the characters "Cao Gong Hui"

"Mausoleum," with the character "Hui" slightly smaller and shifted a bit to the left. In the bottom right corner, the small characters "Ren Wu" (the cyclical year) are engraved vertically. These, together with the "Ren Wu" annotation in the 200-year-old *Jiaxu* edition of *Dream of the Red Chamber* with commentary by Zhiyanzhai, jointly confirm the true story behind these noble bones.