Classic Chinese Novels () are the best-known novels of pre-modern Chinese literature. These are among the world's longest and oldest novels. They represented a new complexity in structure and sophistication in language that helped to establish the novel as a respected form among later popular audiences and sophisticated critics. They include the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and The Plum in the Golden Vase of the Ming dynasty and Dream of the Red Chamber (Story of the Stone) and The Scholars of the Qing dynasty. The Chinese historian and literary theorist C. T. Hsia wrote that these six "remain the most beloved novels among the Chinese." Nomenclature and subgroupings The literary critic and sinologist Andrew H. Plaks writes that the term "classic novels" in reference to these six titles is a "neologism of twentieth-century scholarship" that seems to have come into common use under the influence of C. T. Hsia's The Classic Chinese Novel. He adds that he is not sure at what point in the Qing or early twentieth century this became a "fixed critical category" but the grouping appears in a wide range of critical writing. Paul Ropp notes that "an almost universal consensus affirms six works as truly great". Hsia views them as "historically the most important landmarks" of the novels of China. There have been a number of groupings. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin and The Plum in the Golden Vase were grouped by publishers in the early Qing and promoted as Four Masterworks (). Because of its explicit descriptions of sex, The Plum in the Golden Vase was banned for most of its existence. Despite this, Lu Xun, like many if not most scholars and writers, place it among the top Chinese novels. Several Western reference works consider Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber as China's Four Great Classical Novels. Textual history and authorship None of the six were published in the author's lifetime. Three Kingdoms and Water Margin appeared in many variants and forms long before being edited in their classic form in the late Ming. There is considerable debate on their authorship. Since the novel, unlike poetry or painting, had little prestige, authorship was of little interest in any case. While tradition attributes Water Margin to Shi Nai'an, there is