Writers › Writer / Poet
Ji Junxiang
Yuan playwright of Dadu whose Orphan of Zhao, the first Chinese play translated into a European language, was reworked by Voltaire as The Orphan of China
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Ji Tianxiang
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Ji Junxiang, also written Ji Tianxiang, was a native of Dadu known only from Zhong Sicheng's Register of Ghosts (Lugui bu), which makes him a contemporary of Li Shouqing and Zheng Tingyu and lists six of his plays. Only The Orphan of Zhao (Zhaoshi gu'er) survives complete, with fragments of one other. Adapted from the House of Zhao chapter of the Records of the Grand Historian, it tells how Tu'an Gu wiped out the Zhao clan of Jin and how Cheng Ying and Gongsun Chujiu gave up their lives and sons to save the last Zhao heir, who grows up to take revenge. The French Jesuit Joseph de Premare translated it, and his version appeared in 1735 in Du Halde's Description of the Chinese Empire, the first Chinese drama put into a European language. Voltaire turned it into a five-act tragedy staged in Paris in 1755. Wang Guowei's History of Song and Yuan Drama (Song Yuan xiqu kao) judged that it could stand among the great tragedies of the world.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; early Yuan