Pingbo. Hawkes and his Chinese classmates were present in Tiananmen Square on 1 October 1949 to hear Mao Zedong announce the founding of the People's Republic of China following the Communist Party of China's defeat of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) in the Chinese Civil War. Marriage and career In 1950, Hawkes was joined in Beijing by his fiancée, Jean, and the two were married in April 1950 after a long negotiation with the local police station. Within several months Hawkes' wife became pregnant and China entered the Korean War, and the couple was strongly advised to leave China. They departed China in 1951 and returned to Oxford, where Hawkes continued his graduate study in Chinese under the American sinologist Homer H. Dubs, Oxford's new chair of Chinese. He received a D.Phil. in 1955 with a dissertation entitled "The Problem of Date and Authorship of Ch'u Tz'u", a study of the 3rd century BC anthology Verses of Chu (Chu ci; ). Hawkes' work attracted the attention of the prominent translator Arthur Waley, whom Hawkes came to consider his mentor. Hawkes succeeded Dubs as Oxford's chair of Chinese in 1959, and much of his tenure focused on altering the Chinese curriculum to include modern Chinese literature, which it had not previously covered. By the end of the 1950s, the curriculum covered not only the Chinese Classics, but also the premodern Four Great Novels and the short stories of Lu Xun. Hawkes' lectures were noted as being "scholarly but entertaining" to the point of being suggestive of his "early love of the theatre". In the 1960s, Hawkes became increasingly interested in Cao Xueqin's 18th-century epic novel Dream of the Red Chamber (), and in 1970 he was approached by Penguin Books to do a non-scholarly translation for publication in the Penguin Classics series. Translating all 120 chapters of Dream of Red Chamber proved a huge task, and in 1971 Hawkes shocked much of the Sinological world by resigning the chair of Chinese to focus exclusively on his translation. He obtained a Research Fellowship at All Souls College in 1973, which provided him with financial support during his translation work, which took nearly 10 years. He translated the first 80 chapters of the novel, which were published in three volumes (1973, 1977, 1980) under the novel's original title Story of the Stone (Shitou ji; ). The remaining 40 chapters, which appeared