Drawing on data from the vernacular novel Honglou Meng 红楼楼 (A Dream of Red Mansions), also referred to as Shitou Ji 石头记 (The Story of the Stone), a vernacular Chinese novel written in the Qing dynasty, this study examines the ways in which speakers referred to/ addressed themselves in pre-modern Chinese society. Its goal is to contextually analyse the circumstances under which characters in the novel employ the expressions for self-reference and reveal the possible motivations behind their choice, so as to more fully exhibit the complexities of politeness behind the use of Chinese address forms.