Gladys Yang

Who was Gladys Yang?

Gladys Yang was a British translator of Chinese literature and the wife of another noted translator, Yang Xianyi. Her father was a missionary to China and, from childhood, she became a lover of Chinese culture.

Born Gladys Margaret Taylor in Peking, she returned to England as a child and became Oxford's first graduate in Chinese in 1940. She met Yang at Oxford. After their marriage, the Peking-based couple became prominent translators of Chinese literature into English during the latter half of the twentieth century at the Foreign Languages Press.

The couple were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. Later in life, they spoke out against the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Their biography has been officially banned in China as a result. Gladys Yang died in Beijing in 1999, aged 80.