Beijing Botanical Garden

This guide centers on a mud-walled cottage in the Beijing Botanical Garden, home to Cao Xueqin, a young man born into one of China's wealthiest families before it was ruined by imperial accusations around 1728. It follows him north to these western hills, where for roughly a decade he worked and reworked one sprawling novel by candlelight, rewriting it, by his own account, five times over. You'll hear about the grief that struck him in 1762 and how he kept writing anyway. Look at the low doorway and plain rooms where that novel took shape.