Chiang Yee (; 19 May 1903 – 26 October 1977), self-styled as "The Silent Traveller" (哑行者), was a Chinese poet, author, painter and calligrapher. The success of The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland (1937) was followed by a series of books in the same vein, all of which he illustrated himself. He was a nominee for the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature.

1903–1933: China

Chiang Yee was born in Jiujiang, China, on a day variously recorded as 19 May or 14 June. His father was a painter.

1933–1955: England

From 1935 to 1938 Chiang taught Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies (now School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, and 1938 to 1940 worked at the Wellcome Museum of Anatomy and Pathology. and Dymia Hsiung, the first Chinese woman to write a fictionalised autobiography in English.

After publication of the Silent Traveller books, Chiang became friends with a number of British intellectuals and people involved in the arts. He is thought to be only the third Chinese person to receive a blue plaque, i.e. a memorial created by English Heritage. (Writer Lao She has a blue plaque in Notting Hill and Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Republic of China, is commemorated in the village of Cottered in Hertfordshire.)

References

Further reading

  • Paul Bevan, Anne Witchard and Da Zheng (eds), Chiang Yee and His Circle. Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950. Hong Kong University Press, 2022.
  • Huang, Shuchen S., "Chiang Yee", in Asian-American Autobiographers: a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook, edited by Guiyou Huang, Greenwood Press, 2001. .
  • Da Zheng. "Chiang Yee". Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Deborah Madsen. (MI: Thomson Gale, 2005) Vol. 312: 36–43.
  • Da Zheng. "Let Us Remember Fengliu instead of Miseries: Dayou Poems and Chinese Diaspora". Journal of Transnational American Studies, 4 (1) 2012. http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2b9067vd
  • Da Zheng. Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller from the East: A Cultural Biography. NJ: Rutgers University, 2010.
  • Da Zheng. "Chinese Calligraphy and Traditional Chinese Culture in America". Journal of Chinese American Studies. 14 (August 2007) 31–47, In Chinese; "Chinese Calligraphy and Traditional Chinese Culture in America". Journal of Chinese American Studies. 14 (August 2007) 48–77, In English.
  • Da Zheng, 'The Traveling of Art and the Art of Traveling: Chiang Yee's Painting and Chinese Cultural Tradition'. Studies in the Literary Imagination. 37:1 (Spring 2004) 169–190.
  • Da Zheng, 'Writing of Home and Home of Writing', Comparative American Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 488–505 (2003).
  • Da Zheng. "Double Perspective: The Silent Traveler in the Lake District". Mosaic 31.1 (2003) 161–78.
  • Janoff, Ronald, "Encountering Chiang Yee: A Western Insider Reading Response to Eastern Outsider Travel Writing" (Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Dissertation Services, 2002).
  • Da Zheng. "Chinese Painting, Travel Literature, and Cultural Interpretation". In Rudolphus Teeuwen and Shu-li Chang, eds., Crossings: Travel, Art, Literature, Politics (Taipei: Bookman Books, 2001) 217–37.
  • Da Zheng. "Chinese Painting and Cultural Interpretation: Chiang Yee’s Travel Writing during the Cold War Era". Prospects, 26 (2001) 477–504.
  • Da Zheng. "Home Construction: Chinese Poetry and American Landscape in Chiang Yee’s Travel Writings". The Journeys, 1:1–2 (2000) 59–85.
  • Introduction to 300 T'ANG POEMS
  • Gallery of Chiang Yee's paintings of the English Lake District
  • The silent traveller: Chiang Yee in Britain 1933-55
  • Oxfordshire Blue Plaques: Chiang Yee