Wild Goose Tracks in the Snow: An Illustrated Record of my Preordained Life by Wanyan Linqing (1791-1846): a nineteenth-century memoir

Abstract

Wanyan Linqing (1791-1846) was a Manchu Bannerman who travelled throughout China as an official in service of the Qing Court. In his later years he acquired and moved into a renowned garden-mansion in Peking, where he composed an autobiographical memoir in classical Chinese, Hongxue yinyuan tuji (Wild Goose Tracks in the Snow: An Illustrated Record of my Preordained Life), recording, in two hundred and forty chapters each accompanied by a woodblock illustration, as many moments of his life deemed to have been the most memorable. During the 1980s, the first one hundred and seventy chapters of this memoir were translated and annotated in Hong Kong by Mongol Bannerman Professor Yang Tsung-han (1901-1992). Under the guidance of Professor John Minford, Christina Sanderson has recently compiled the first complete translation and annotation of this work, by editing Yang's existing translation and commentary and translating and annotating the final seventy chapters. This thesis is a reflection on that memoir, and on the process of its translation. It argues that Tracks in the Snow is a remarkable window into the world of traditional China. To prove this, it presents several different ways of reading the memoir, including from a biographical and historical perspective, and in the context of literature.