Despite Liang Ch’i-ch’ao’s custom writing arguments to the contrary, the status of traditional Chinese vernacular fiction as a secondary model for twentieth-century Chinese fiction improved with increasing research in this field during and after the late Ch’ing. For instance, the famous literary scholar Wang Kuo-wei (1877–1927) asserted that the eighteenth-century essay writing novel Hung-lou meng (A Dream of Red Towers), by Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in (c. 1724–1764), stands alone among essay writing traditional vernacular masterpieces as the only thoroughgoing tragedy in the history of premodern Chinese fiction and drama. Ts’ao’s masterpiece strongly colors the fiction of writers like Chang Ai-ling (Eileen Chang; 1920–1995), who custom essay knew the novel by heart. Writers such as Wu Tsu-hsiang custom essays (1908–1994) adopted A Dream of Red Towers as a kind of textbook of masterly custom writing vernacular phraseology, while even disparagers of Ts’ao essay paper Hsüeh-ch’in’s novel, such as Wu Chien-jen (1867– 1910), viewed it as a standard against which contemporary novels were invariably compared.