the Wake ; Patrick O ' Brien ' s Master & Commander. 11See Arthur Machen ' s classic The Novel of the White Powder. version of a Chinese novel that succeeded in captivating the imagination of the European reading public ( including Goethe ) .
 
Their work was promptly translated into French, Dutch and German. I can see no better model. And yet with the increasing specialisation of Sinology, their achievement has been neglected and belittled as amateurish. 314315 None of these activities would have born any Kong had bravely decided to take on the series ( 1996 ) , 12 the process of editing the typescript of the First Book of The Deer and the Cauldron began. I was very fortunate to have assigned to me as an editor by O.U.P. someone who had already accumulated considerable editorial experience with translations from Chinese, and had recently written her own popular romance based on the story of the classic drama The Western Cham-ber.13 I learned a great deal from her scrupulous and imaginative editorial work, and the book profited enormously by it. Finally, with the much-publicised launch in October 1997 of the First Book of Deer, came a huge amount of