Embassy to the Kingdom of Heaven (Abridged English Translation by Timothy Richard)
This 1913 Shanghai publication marks the first English abridgment of Journey to the West, reimagined by a Welsh missionary as a Christian allegory.
A Mission to Heaven: A Great Chinese Epic and Allegory was translated by the Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard (1845–1919) and published in 1913 by the Christian Literature Society's Depot in Shanghai. It stands as the earliest English abridged translation of Journey to the West. Spanning approximately three hundred and seventy pages, the volume includes a thirty-nine-page extended introduction. The narrative is heavily compressed and nearly rewritten, leading later translators such as Yu Guofan to describe it as "nothing more than a brief retelling and adaptation." Timothy Richard mistakenly believed the Yuan Dynasty Daoist Qiu Chuji to be the original author and interpreted the quest for the scriptures as a religious allegory for "Mahayana Christianity," deliberately highlighting parallels with Christian doctrine. The translation contains various omissions—such as rewriting Clairvoyance and Clairaudience simply as "telescopes"—and extensively replaces Buddhist and Daoist concepts with Christian terminology. Although its academic value is limited, the book helped bring Journey to the West to the attention of Western readers in the early twentieth century and reflects the unique path of cross-cultural interpretation during that era.