San Guo Yan Yi is one of the best-known classic Chinese novels in the English-speaking world. The earliest English translation came out in 1820, while a range of further translations have been produced over the past two hundred years. How do the different versions relate to each other? This volume examines the intertextual relations between the English translations of San Guo Yan Yi. Intertextuality refers to the interdependence of texts in relation to one another. Focusing on the perspectives of impact, quotation, parallels and transformation, the author compares a range of the translated versions, including two full-length translations and over twenty excerpted renderings and partial adaptations since the 1820s. She discovers that excerpted translations are selected to fit the translators’ own narrations, and are adapted to many genres, such as poetry, drama, fairytales, and textbooks. Moreover, the original text, translated texts and other related English works are interconnected in one large network, for which intertextuality offers an ideal basis for research. Students and scholars of Chinese literature and translation studies will benefit from this book.

This book offers a study of the cosmogonic works by Fr. Angelo Zottoli S.J., a Jesuit missionary who has received relatively little attention by modern scholars, but who deserves a special recognition for his theological and philosophical ideas. More generally, the book aims to shed light on the importance of cosmogony in the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary environment of Xujiahui, the area in modern Shanghai where Zottoli flourished. It shows how through Zottoli’s teaching and sermons he was able to reimagine his own cosmogonic ideas, his personality, and his relationship with local Chinese converts. Among Zottoli’s most famous students was Ma Xiangbo (馬相伯 1840–1939) and Zottoli played a crucial role in Ma’s intellectual formation. A wider familiarity with Zottoli’s works is not only interesting in and of itself, but also paves the way to future studies on the complex and multifaceted relationship between European missionaries and Chinese students in Shanghai during the nineteenth century.

The commercialized economy of late imperial China depended on efficient transport, yet transport technologies, transport economics as well as its role in local societies and in interdependencies of environments and human activities are acutely under-researched. Nanny Kim analyses two transports systems into the Southwest of Qing China through the long eighteenth century and up to the mid-nineteenth century civil wars. The case studies explore shipping on the Upper Changjiang in Sichuan and through the Three Gorges into Hubei, and road transport out of the Sichuan Basin across northeastern Yunnan and northwestern Guizhou into central Yunnan. Specific and concrete investigations of a river that presented extreme dangers to navigation and carriage across the crunch zone of the Himalayan Plateau provides a basis for a systematic reconstruction of transport outside the lowland centres and their convenient networks of water transport.