The subject of this year’s seminar is Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century novel The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng紅樓夢) and its referents. Critics conventionally read Stone as though it described the lived world of its author. More than any other pre-modern novel, Stone has generated a wealth of secondary materials regarding the material world which its author is presumed to have known. We will consider this tradition of reading and ask what has allowed it to adhere, looking at examples from both traditional commentary and contemporary scholarship. We will examine the writing regarding the visual and material culture of the novel, and extend this investigation to analyze the novel’s complicated relation to the question of reference. We will also look at some of the dramatic sequels to the novel and ask how these dramatizations might illuminate the ways in which the novel created an anticipatory quality of reference that made possible its own sequels.