In the beginning, the Goddess Nuwa melted down stones to repair the dome of heaven. She used thirty-six thousand five hundred and one blocks of divine stone, and when she had finished, one single block remained unused.

This lonely stone had been touched by the goddess's divine power and had gained consciousness. It lay at the foot of the Greensickness Peak in the Great Folly Mountains, grieving that it alone among all its brethren had been deemed unworthy to hold up the sky.

One day, a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest passed by. The stone begged them to take it into the world of mortals, to experience the joys and sorrows of human existence.

"Very well," the monk said, "but know this: the world of red dust is a place of illusions. What seems sweet will turn bitter. What brings joy will bring sorrow. Are you certain?"

"I am certain," the stone replied.

The monk transformed the stone into a piece of beautiful jade and took it with him. Many eons later, another Taoist priest passed by Greensickness Peak and found a great stone covered in inscriptions—the entire story of the stone's journey through the mortal realm.

The story began with two families: the Jia family and the Zhen family. The Jias were an aristocratic clan of immense wealth and prestige in the imperial capital, their compound the size of a small town, with pavilions, gardens, lakes, and hundreds of servants. The Zhen family, lower in status but respectable in their own right.

It was here, among the endless corridors and moon-viewing terraces of the Jia mansion, that a boy named Jia Baoyu would be born with a piece of jade in his mouth.

And it was here that the most profound love story in Chinese literature would unfold—a story of women, of fate, of the impermanence of all earthly splendor.

For this is not merely a tale of romance. It is a dream—the longest, most beautiful, and most heartbreaking dream ever written.