Bai Xingjian

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Bai.

File:Sanyoushiren.jpg

Statues of Bai Xingjian, Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen in Yichang, Hubei, China.

Bai Xingjian (simplified Chinese: 白行简; traditional Chinese: 白行簡; pinyin: Bái Xíngjiǎn or Bó Xíngjiǎn; Wade–Giles: Pai Hsing-chien or Po Hsing-chien, 776–826) was a fiction writer and poet in imperial China's Tang Dynasty. He was a younger brother of the famed poet Bai Juyi.

One of his most famous works is the novella The Tale of Li Wa. It has been translated into English many times:

• by Arthur Waley in More Translations from the Chinese (1919) — as "The Story of Miss Li".
• by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang in The Dragon King's Daughter: Ten T'ang Dynasty Stories (1962) — as "Story of a Singsong Girl".
• by Glen Dudbridge in The Tale of Li Wa: Study and Critical Edition of a Chinese Story from the Ninth Century (1983).

It was also translated into many other languages, for example German by Franz Kuhn and French by André Lévy.

Further reading

• Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo yanjiu zilao (T: 中國古典小說研究資料), ed., Bo Xingjian yu "Li Wa zhuan" (T: 白行簡與李娃傳). Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1982.