China Girls

This exquisite and delicate watercolour album is from Hong Kong. There is very little information available at Carnegie Mellon University's Posner Library website. It mentions that the paintings are by 12 different artists of the 12 beautiful ladies from 'Hung Lou Meng' by Ts'ao Chan. I am presuming, from a further snippet, that the book or story is from the 18th century. The album itself ('Ch‘i lin shih erh chai cheng ch‘eng') was produced in the 20th century (probably early). I count only 11 ladies above. I must have missed one. How remiss of me. I have touched up some background artifact in many of the above images (click for larger versions).