A Dream of Red Mansions, China's 18th century classic, must have been written by Cao Xueqin alone, according to the extensive research of a Chinese scholar.

Professor Xia He with the Lanzhou Institute of Commerce based in the north western province of Gansu has worked hard to disprove the commonly held belief that Cao finished only 80 chapters before he died and that the following 40 chapters were written by Gao E.

Xia, together with his wife Hua Meiyun and son Xia Lei, spent 16 years collating different editions of the masterpiece and comparing them with a 120-chapter manuscript that had been hand copied during the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1736-1796) in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The handwritten manuscript, discovered in 1959 in the northern province of Shanxi, was believed to be the authentic manuscript of Cao Xueqin (about 1715-1764) and all other versions had been hand copied by different people who had added revisions.

Yu Pingbo, a noted modern scholar who has studied the classic all his life, believes the same manuscript to be "a revised edition itself that had referred to many other revisions".

But Prof. Xia said all the 120 chapters in the manuscript had been written in the dialect of Nanjing, in eastern Jiangsu Province. "Cao himself was a native of Nanjing," he said. "Gao E was from northeast China and could not have been so familiar with the Nanjing dialect."

Hu Shi (1891-1962), a noted Chinese scholar, was the first to proclaim that Gao was the author of the final 40 chapters of the novel.

Hu found clues from a poem written by Zhang Chuanshan, who became Gao's friend when the two stood out in the same year from large crowds of imperial examinees. The poem mentioned rumors that Gao had co-authored the book.

Prof. Xia, however, said it was merely hearsay and therefore was not reliable information.

Hu Shi was confident that the 120 chapters were not written by the same author partly because the end of the story did not echo the poems that foretold the destiny of several heroines, as well as  some contradictory details between the first 80 chapters and the last 40.

But Prof. Xia argued the destiny of all the characters kept changing as the story developed. "Therefore its end did not really contradict the beginning," he said.

Xia and his family have restored what they believe to be the authentic manuscript by Cao Xueqin, and marked all the revisions to show how the revised editions had come out.

The restored manuscript has been published by Lanzhou University Press.

A Dream of Red Mansions has been translated into many languages and enjoys a huge readership across the world. The classic has given birth to "redology", a unique branch of learning in modern Chinese literature history that first appeared in the Qing Dynasty after Cao's novel began to circulate in the form of hand-made copies.

Some redologists are focusing on what is called "cao-ology" to study the writer's life, family and relatives, often with a view to identifying real life models after whom the main characters in the novel could have been based.

(Xinhua News Agency December 11, 2003)