Hung Lou Meng, Book I

NOTES

[Notes on ebook edition. The original Chinese novel was written by Cao Xueqin. Another author later added half again as much. H. Bencraft Joly translated only the work of the first author, essentially two-thirds of the whole; the work ends abruptly at the end of volume II as if he intended to go on, but the third volume was never published. The work was not well proofread originally. There are other better and more complete English translations, but this is the only one we could find that is in the public domain in the USA.

Both lists of errata have been corrected in the text. The error noted in the original errata list as being on page 140 was actually on page 145. There were far too many punctuation errata that were corrected, to list them all here.

There IS such a word as 'teapoy'; it is NOT 'teapot' and it means a three-legged table. 'Dullness' was consistently spelled 'dulness' and is left thus. 'Decrepit' was consistently spelled 'decrepid' and is left thus. 'Dote, dotes,' etc. was consistently spelled 'doat, doats,' etc. and is left thus. 'License' is spelled once thus and once 'licence.' The word 'speciality' appears only once, and that is the proper British spelling.

Whenever a proper name normally contained an umlaut we attempted to supply it in the instances where it was missing; this was most common with the name Pao-yue. There were also variations of use of apostrophes in proper names, and many were corrected. Neither of these is listed in the errata above.]