Early Books

阿麗思漫遊奇境記

[Story of Ālìsī’s Roaming in a Land of Miracles].

Translated by Yuen Ren Chao [Zhao Yuanren]

Illustrated by John Tenniel and T. H. Robinson.

Shanghai: Shang-wu yin shu kuan (Commercial Press), 1931.

This is the 5th edition of the first Chinese translation. Copies of this edition are scarce and copies of the 1st–4th editions are virtually unobtainable. Zhao was a well-known Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer. There is a story—now proved apocryphal—that in 1931 the Governor of Hunan Province in China banned this book from school use, arguing that “animals should not use human language, and that it was disastrous to put animals and human beings on the same level.”

Exhibit item 2.11