Wang Keaou Lwan pih neen chang han, or The lasting resentment of Miss Keaou Lwan Wang, a Chinese tale; founded on fact. Translated from the original by Sloth. (Inscribed by Rev. David Thom)

Canton : printed at the Canton Press Office, 1839. Small quarto, recent half calf over marbled papered boards, spine with contrasting red leather title label lettered in gilt; bound with the original printed green upper wrapper (stained and re-margined) retaining the two original pasted-on printed slips worded ‘Translated from the original by Robert Thom, Esq., resident in Canton’ (these are pasted over ‘Translated from the original by Sloth’, and ‘London:- Ball, Arnold, & Co. Paternoster Row, 1840’, respectively), the verso of the wrapper with a faint inscription by Thom’s brother, Rev. David Thom: ‘… translated into German & published at Leipzig, by [Jurany] 1846’; the title-page (expertly relaid) has two further inscriptions by David Thom, the first presenting this copy ‘To the Curators of the Radcliffe Library, Oxford, from D. Thom’, the second explaining the true identity behind the pseudonym “Sloth”: ‘Robert Thom Esq. Consul at Ningpo, China’; pp. [i-iv], v-viii, lithographed plate ‘Lithographed at Canton 1839’ (reproducing a Chinese woodcut), [1]-66, [2 blank]; the plate with water-staining (mostly confined to the margins, but encroaching slightly on the bottom corner of the image), the first page of the main text with light foxing, otherwise clean and crisp throughout.

Translation by consular official and sinologist Robert Thom of novel thirty-five in the Ming anthology of stories known as the Jingu qiguan.

Robert Thom (1807-1846) became fluent in Mandarin while working for the English trading house Jardine, Matheson & Co. in Canton in the 1830s. (It is interesting to note that the present work is dedicated to William Jardine, James Matheson and Henry Wright). Due to his translation skills he was seconded to the British armed forces during the First Opium War of 1839-42. He was later appointed British consul in Ningpo, where he died in 1846.

The Lasting resentment of Miss Keaou Lwan Wang was Thom’s first published translation. Printed in Canton, it was circulated in England. The story itself clearly had some popular appeal in Europe, as three German editions would appear in 1846-47. Thom also published a Mandarin translation of Aesop’s Fables (Canton, 1840), the important Chinese and English vocabulary (Canton, 1843), and the first part of The Chinese speaker (1846), an anthology of Thom’s own translations which was left uncompleted owing to his early death.

Cordier, BS, 1768; Löwendahl, China illustrata nova, 1752; Lust, 1103