One of the all-time great Chinese classics, this is like Chinese Shakespeare. You have two very wealthy and powerful families living in splendor in the capital. They appear to have it all in a very sophisticated and rich culture. No struggles for survival here - the daily grind is manners, style, subtle inclinations, peaks of ecstasy and oceans of tears over incomprehensibly irrelevant minutae - the struggles of the very rich.

The story involves tons of Chinese period detail which is nice. You see again that times and places are different, but people aren't, via star-crossed lovers, family politics, successes and failures, hopes realized and dashed, and lots of dialog and personal interactions. In short, there are about a dozen tear-jerker movies in here.

This story is very long. (Penguin does this in five paperback volumes.) You can do very well to get an abridgement. This will give you the story and more than enough detail. Remember that, as Shakespeare's characters come primarily from the most upper classes, so do these, and you get the same sort of limited view. But so what.