Since It is Old Picture Restoration

Since it is called "Little Lecture", this is naturally a small book, and it can only provide a glimpse of the results of Zhou's research on Hongxue; although I do not agree with Zhou Ruchang's contempt for the last forty chapters of "A Dream of Red Mansions", I cannot bear him in this small book. The authoritative arrogance exuded in him, but I would never comment lightly on his research on red studies until I read his more weighty works such as "The New Evidence of a Dream of Red Mansions".

However, when I read the fifteenth lecture of "Little Lectures on the Red Chamber", I saw a very outrageous text, which made my impression old picture restoration of Zhou Ruchang as a scholar extremely bad. This is the last paragraph of the associate editor of Lecture 15, where he compares (what he thinks is) Cao Xueqin's clever use of numbers in A Dream of Red Mansions with Shakespeare's sonnets: 2022-06-27_21_25_28-Zhou Ruchang,_Red Lou Lecture Image source: "Little Lecture in the Red Chamber" / Image provided by the author The problem is that what

Zhou Ruchang said categorically here as "it is already known to the world" is not only not known to the world, it is also not a fact at all! To make matters worse, it is extremely easy to verify - Shakespeare's sonnets have a total of 154 sonnets, and there is a standard order, just find the first to the fourteenth, and take the first of each in order. Lines are arranged in a sonnet, and you can immediately see that it is not in the form of an English sonnet, nor does it make sense, and it is not a poem at all (as is the case with the second line).