The Writing of the Unwritten and the Translation of the Untranslatable: Alexandra David-Néel’s Reception in China

The French writer and explorer Alexandra David-Néel (1868-1969) is internationally renowned for being the first Western woman to reach, in 1924, Tibet's onetime forbidden capital of Lhasa. Her personal recounting of this treacherous expedition, in Voyage d'une parisienne à Lhassa, is considered one of the most compelling travelogues ever written in French. As a maverick figure of French Orientalism, David-Néel was introduced to Chinese readers long ago. Yet a close look at her reception in China brings to light some of the most tangled aspects of West-East cross-cultural representation, such as clichéd exoticism, translatorial censorship, forgery of ideologically edifying discourses, and so forth. Through a series of philological investigations of some heavily modulated Chinese translations of David-Néel's writings, I show that the tripartite, interpretive dynamic between France, Tibet, and modern-day China cannot simply be reduced to a dualistic, unilateral, and static power pattern, since we see that the Chinese, despite being themselves "Oriental," could, advisedly or unconsciously, produce falsified images of another "Oriental" entity placed at a less advantageous position through a French medium.