c. 1500-c. 1582 · Ming-dynasty Chinese scholar and poet traditionally credited with the novel Journey to the West
Portrait of Sun Wukong (illustration from Journey to the West). Source · Public domain
About Wu Cheng'en
Wu Cheng'en (c. 1500–c. 1582) was a scholar and poet from Huai'an in Jiangsu who held minor official posts under the Ming dynasty. The earliest surviving edition of Journey to the West (1592) names no author; the attribution to Wu rests on a local gazetteer and was championed by Qing and early 20th-century scholars such as Hu Shi and Lu Xun, and some scholars still regard it as uncertain. The translator of the library text, Timothy Richard (1845–1919), was a Welsh Baptist missionary in China, known for famine relief in Shanxi in the late 1870s and as secretary of the Christian Literature Society in Shanghai.
Journey to the West is the great Ming-dynasty comic and religious novel about the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage from Tang China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by a band of supernatural disciples. The library text is not a full translation.
