Lian Zhang, our foremost authority on Chaucer’s reception in China, has published an article in the most recent issue of postmedieval. This time, her research deals with the Republican period, a span roughly corresponding to the years just before WW1 and just after WW2 when several young Chinese scholars studied in the U.K. and the United States with some formidable medievalists. In addition to bringing Chaucer back to Chinese university classrooms, the Chinese scholars often brought these mentors to China, thereby working to create fruitful ties between China and the west.

I reproduce here the article’s abstract:

This essay studies the teaching of the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in China during the Republican period (1912-1949), through evidence of students, faculty, institutions, and textbooks. Drawing on university curricula, diaries and recollections of professors and students, and publications of textbooks and modern adaptations of Chaucer’s works, this essay provides a detailed narration of an early part of the reception history of Chaucer in China. Chinese scholars studied Chaucer in Europe and America since the 1910s, gave courses on Chaucer after returning to China, and published Chaucer’s text in Middle English and modern adaptations. The teaching of Chaucer had a great impact on Chinese students and the academic world at the time, and it reflected China’s literary and cultural initiation into what the social reformers saw as modernization in a socially transitional period. This essay argues that Chaucer played a significant role in Chinese discourses of modernization over the twentieth century, and that the Chinese Chaucer was created by two types of reception, as he was claimed both by social reformers for his role in promoting the vernacular language and by traditionalists for the moral themes of his tales. Literary education at the time was influenced not only by China’s pursuit of modernity signified by a rise of vernacular Chinese language and literature, but also by the traditional cultural values grounded in Confucianism.