A Study of 19th-Century English Translations of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Bilingual Edition): Texts, Translators & Reception

This is not a translation of the Three Kingdoms, and it is not a general history of Chinese fiction in the West. It is a scholarly study, written in Chinese, of the very first English-language encounters with Romance of the Three Kingdoms—the scattered articles, dictionary entries, textbook excerpts, and partial translations that appeared in nineteenth-century journals and language-learning materials, most of them now held in libraries in Harvard, London, and elsewhere. The author, Wang Yan, spent years tracking down more than twenty rare sources, and she organizes them into four types: general commentary, character portraits, chapter selections, and Chinese-language textbooks. Each section shows what the translator did, why they did it, and how their reading shaped the way English-speaking readers first understood the novel. English originals and Chinese back-translations are appended. If you are a researcher or student working on translation history, Sino-Western literary exchange, or the global reception of Chinese fiction, and want a case-based, source-rich reference—rather than a translation itself or a broad survey—this is it.