Remembering Chinese scholar Yang Xianyi (1915 – 2009)
At the early morning hour, 6:45AM, on November 23, 2009, renowned Chinese scholar, translator, and interpreter of Chinese and Western literature, Yang Xianyi (楊憲益) died in Beijing at the age of 94. During his lifetime, he and his wife, Gladys Margaret Tayler (戴乃迭), translated more than 60 Chinese classics, both ancient and modern, into English. Their most noticeable work is the translation of the famous 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), one of the four greatest Chinese novels. There are other translations of this Chinese classic, but the work done by the Yangs is widely accepted as the best.
Yang Xianyi was born in the city of Tianjin on January 10, 1915, into a scholar-gentry family of the late Manchu dynasty. His father was head of the Bank of China in Tianjin. Yang was only five when his father died. In Yang’s autobiography, he wrote that as the only son, he attended board meetings at the age of 7 as his father’s representative.
Yang’s early education was studying the Chinese classics with a private tutor at home. Later he attended a missionary school in one of Tianjin’s foreign concessions. There he devoured English literature, from classics to the modern. His goal was to go abroad and study ancient Greek.
In 1934 with the help of one of the missionary school teachers, Yang entered Merton College, Oxford, where he studied ancient Greek and Roman classics for two years before he switched to French and English literature.
In 1936 Yang Xianyi met Gladys Tayler through a mutual friend. Gladys was born in Beijing where her father was a missionary at the Oxford China Society. While growing up in China, Gladys developed a strong interest and fondness for Chinese culture and literature. After meeting Yang 
Xianyi, Gladys Tayler switched her major to Chinese and became the first graduate in Chinese from Oxford. Together they translated Li Sao, a Chinese classic by Qu Yuan (4th century BC) into English heroic couplets. This was the beginning of a lifelong working partnership and enduring love for the couple.
In 1940 Yang Xianyi and Gladys Tayler returned to China and lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing, where they soon married and worked as teachers and translators.
Horrified by the Kuomingtang Chiang Kai-shek regime, Yang Xianyi joined the underground, passing information gleaned from foreign diplomats. He was among a group of intellectuals who decided to stay and help rebuild China after the Communists took over.
In 1952 both he and Gladys joined the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. They were in charge of translating all important Chinese literature into English. Over the years, the Yangs translated more than 60 titled works, of which tens of thousands of foreign students of Chinese then and today still use and rely upon as their resource. The best known titles are:
- The Courtesan’s Jewel Box (宋明平話小說選)
- The Scholars (儒林外史)
- Selected stories by Lu Xun (魯迅選讀)
- Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢)
The couple was arrested in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution, Yang Xianyi on charges of being a foreign spy and Gladys put into solitary confinement. In 1971, because Gladys still retained her British citizenship, her plight was raised in the British House of Commons, and the British government intervened with the Chinese on her behalf. A year later, the couple were released and they continued with their work. Having survived purges and imprisonment, Yang didn’t make too much of his ordeal. Later in life, the couple spoke out against the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Gladys Tayler Yang died on November 18, 1999, at the age of 80.
The Yangs raised three children. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Tayler Yang are survived by two daughters.Their son committed suicide in 1979.
Yang also translated Homer’s Odyssey into Chinese prose from the ancient Greek original. Other Western classics he translated into Chinese included Aristophanes’ Ornites, Virgil’s Georgics, the oldest surviving major work of French literature, La chanson de Roland, and Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
In 1993 Yang Xianyi received an Honorary Doctorate degree from the University of Hong Kong. Earlier this year, Yang was awarded the lifetime achievement award from the Translators Association of China.
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