ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the translation, rewriting, and circulation of the 1,001 Nights, or The Arabian Nights Entertainments, into Chinese at the beginning of the twentieth century. I argue that this cluster of texts offers ways to see how we might move beyond readings of translation and world literature that are guided by the historical circulation of English, French, and German texts to other parts of the world, especially the so-called non-Western world. As translators, writers, and critics reflected on the Nights, they inevitably drew on Orientalist knowledge, even as China itself was the subject of a different strain of Orientalist study and knowledge production. This connection to the superstructure of Orientalist knowledge about the Middle East produced in Western European languages characterizes Chinese-language reflections about the Middle East throughout the late Qing and, indeed, much of the twentieth century. By engaging with this history of Orientalism and the creation and recreation of the Nights, as well as with other sources related to the places that were imagined in these translation - specifically, turn-of-the-century Egypt - we find surprising possibilities for comparative scholarship.
