Who Were Zhou Wenjun And Cao Zijian?

Making sense of archaic references

Who Were Zhou Wenjun And Cao Zijian?

A depiction of Zhuo Wenjun from Gathering Gems of Beauty (畫麗珠萃秀) by He Dazai (赫達資), a Qing Dynasty artist. I believe He Dazai was a contemporary of Cao Xueqin. At any rate, this was painted at least 1500 years after the death of Zhuo Wenjun.

Have you ever walked into the middle of a conversation accidentally? Ever had that strange feeling where it feels like everybody but you knows perfectly well what is going on?

You probably had that after yesterday’s post.

We read this passage:

至於才子佳人等書，則又開口文君，滿篇子建，千部一腔，千人一面，且終不能不涉淫濫。

The language here is pretty biting. The sarcasm in the English translation is absolutely present in the original:

As for those books about scholarly gentlemen and beautiful ladies, they always start with tales of Zhuo Wenjun and are filled with Cao Zijian: a thousand volumes with the same stale plot, a thousand characters with identical faces. In the end, they never fail to descend into wanton excess.

And, yeah, “scholarly gentlemen and beautiful ladies” (才子佳人, a pretty common classical idiom) is absolutely written in jest. This is Cao Xueqin’s equivalent of a late night Twitter rant.

If you were an ordinary Chinese person in the early 1800s, you’d probably raise your eyebrows at this kind of language. You might check over your shoulder to make sure somebody isn’t sneaking up on you.

But, in 2025, you’re not going to do that. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you’ll figure that Zhuo Wenjun and Cao Zijian were some random people from long ago that don’t matter.

Actually, if you’re really like me, you’ll spend hours trying to figure out what “文君” and “子建” mean in the Chinese original, never bothering to simply Google the words and realize that they’re names. The fact that David Hawkes completely omits both names doesn’t help: if you’re using The Story Of The Stone as your reference, you’re going to start wondering if you’re reading the correct book in Chinese. And then you’ve got the Yangs, who, as we saw yesterday, are more than happy to stick half a dozen names in the passage willy-nilly.

But enough of my own rant. Let’s figure out who Zhuo Wenjun and Cao Zijian were, and why in the world Cao Xueqin is mentioning them.

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