People in the late Qing Dynasty were not clear about many things in the study of the Dream of the Red Chamber (as we have already learned). It is understandable that his inaccuracies (such as saying that Quentin Snow originally ended the work until the death of Lily Forest, etc.) were not clear.
He was also confused about the relationship between the original work and the sequel by Quentin Snow and Gao E. But these are not what we should pay attention to at the moment.
The most important thing is that he clearly recorded a fact that was passed down from generation to generation among the people of the Qing Dynasty: the "latter edition" of The Story of the Stone (that is, the pseudo-sequel of 40 chapters) was continued by scholars hired for a large sum of money - this sequel, which also expressed the intention of the "complete book" as a sequel, is the 120-chapter version that is generally popular among the people!
No reader who has read this book would believe that Quentin Snow "bought" someone else's "preface" and paid a large sum of money (could he afford it?) to hire someone to do it for him.
It should be noted that the process described by Mr. "Man" is exactly the inside story of Heshen's vicious conspiracy to pay Cheng and Gao to forge the "complete version".
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