Gao E (高鶚, c. 1738-c. 1815) was a Chinese scholar and editor. He was a Qing Dynasty scholar who attained the level of juren in 1788 and jinshi in 1795. He was a Han Chinese who belonged to the Bordered Yellow Banner. In 1801 he became a Fellow of the Hanlin Academy. His courtesy name was Yunfu (雲甫) and style name Lanshu (蘭塾，"Orchid Study-Place")
In 1791, together with his partner Cheng Weiyan, he "recovered" the last forty chapters of Cao Xueqin's monumental novel Dream of the Red Chamber (sometimes called The Story of the Stone). The nature and extent of his contributions to the work and the sources of his material are a matter of controversy, but it believed by a large number of modern orthodox Redologists that the last forty chapters was not written by Cao Xueqin.[1] He also edited the first eighty chapters together with Cheng.
In 1921, Hu Shih proposed that the last forty chapters of the 1791-2 Dream of the Red Chamber was written by Gao E himself. His proposition was accepted by many orthodox Redologist scholars, like Zhou Ruchang. Gao and Cheng's continuation is believed by some as a conspiracy by the Qing Dynasty Imperial court to hide the semi-autobiographical nature of the novel, which involves the politics during the Yongzheng era.[2] During the mid-20th century, the discovery of a pre-1791 "120 chapter manuscript" complicated the questions regarding Gao's involvement.[3] Irene Eber found the discovered manuscript "seems to confirm Cheng and Gao's claim that they merely edited a complete manuscript, consisting of 120 chapters, rather than actually writing a portion of the novel."[3]
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