Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Yang Xianyi was a Chinese translator, known for rendering many ancient and a few modern Chinese classics into English, including Dream of the Red Chamber. Born into a wealthy banker family, he was sent to Merton College, Oxford to study Classics in 1936. There he married Gladys Taylor. He had two daughters, and a son (who committed suicide in 1979). Yang and his wife returned to China in 1940, and began their decades long co-operation of introducing Chinese classics to the English-speaking world. Working for Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, a government-funded publisher, the husband and wife team produced a number of quality translations. The works translated include classical Chinese poetry; such classic novels as Dream of the Red Chamber, The Scholars , and Mr. Decadent: Notes Taken in an Outing; and some of Lu Xun''s stories. His wife, Gladys Yang,died in 1999.