It was only a hundred years ago that the novel became a genre read by the masses; if you go back 200 years, Tsao Hsueh-chin's Dream of the Red Chamber was not written for the whole Chinese populace to read.
小說變成大眾讀物，也只是一百年前的事，回到二百年前，曹雪芹的＜紅樓夢＞也不是要寫給全中國人看的。