Yang Jiang was a Chinese playwright, translator, and author. She was the first Chinese academic to translate Miguel de Cervantes' Spanish novel ‘Don Quixote’ to Chinese. Born in Beijing to a rich and educated family in 1911, she graduated from Soochow University. She later attended the graduate school of Tsinghua University where she met her future husband and equally acclaimed author Qian Zhongshu. Regarded as a model couple of that time, the two went abroad after marriage to study at Oxford University in England, and later at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in France. Besides her translation work, Jiang also authored many plays, novels, and essays during her writing career. She was awarded the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise by King Juan Carlos in 1986 for producing the Chinese version of ‘Don Quixote.’ On the personal front, she was happily married and had a daughter. Jiang died in 2016, at the age of 104.
