Cao Xueqin

Cao's family had served for generations as imperial textile commissioners in Nanjing, immensely wealthy and trusted enough to host the Kangxi Emperor on his southern tours, until a change of emperors brought disgrace, confiscation, and a hard fall into poverty that shadowed Cao's own life in Beijing.

He spent roughly a decade writing Dream of the Red Chamber, circulating it in handwritten copies annotated by friends before his death left it unfinished at around eighty chapters; an ending, of disputed authorship, was added and the whole published only in 1791. Read as a thinly veiled account of his own family's rise and ruin, it follows a great house's decline through the doomed loves of its pampered heir.

The novel spawned an entire scholarly discipline, 'Redology,' still devoted to parsing its manuscripts, and remains the most studied work in the Chinese literary canon.