Readers familiar with The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, Footnote ² which includes translation of works by Chinese anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen, will welcome Lydia H. Liu's new collaborative work, this time with Wan Shiguo, on Tianyi and Hengbao (1907–8), initiated by He-Yin Zhen and Liu Shipei in Japan. These two journals are rich historical sources, and particularly valuable for scholars of modern Chinese political and intellectual history. As Wan and Liu point out, these materials have not been preserved well; many surviving issues are in such a poor condition that reprinting is impossible. In addition to publishing the contents of these two journals, Wan and Liu have also decided to edit and annotate them to enhance their accessibility. They have not only corrected many errors, typos, and misspellings, but also provided additional information on the names of people, places, titles, and events. The impressive result of their intellectual and editorial endeavors, this two-volume annotated edition of Tianyi and Hengbao will no doubt benefit and inspire researchers in multiple fields.

In the preface, Wan and Liu provide a complete list of the texts and images that appeared in these two journals. The reader can easily find basic publication information—such as issue number, column title, and author name (when available)—for each item. In the notes on conventions, they explain clearly the organization of the volumes, their editorial principles, existing editions of the original material, and so on. These two sections of the book should be consulted carefully by researchers.

The Chinese language and media both underwent tremendous, complex changes at the turn of the century. Liu and Wan have corrected the most obvious errors, but refrained from imposing our standardized Chinese usage on earlier materials. As they rightly note, what might appear as an “error” to the twentieth-first-century reader could evince interesting historical realities. Indeed, printers and readers in China at the time struggled to keep up with the mind-boggling speed of cultural change, the explosion of literary creativity, and unpredictable practices of translation and language borrowing.

For example, Tianyi and Hengbao published some similar columns, such as “The Editorial,” “Current Events,” and “Translated Material.” Contributors reported and commented on social and political issues on national and transnational levels, often drawing on a wide range of earlier Chinese sources in writing. The most laborious task for Wan was to check these Chinese sources, including the Confucian classics, official dynastic histories, and literati collections of works. For instance, the sixteen footnotes on p. 109 show that, to correct the inaccurate quotes and typos in one passage, Wan consulted Zhou li, Han shu, Hou Hanshu, and writings by two medieval literati. It is true that some readers might not agree with all the corrections made by the editors, or might question the lack of correction in some places. For instance, on p. 197, the editors added the character yi 義 [fn. 1] in a way that some may argue slightly changed the meaning of the sentence, or privileged one interpretation over another. Nonetheless, Wan has done an excellent job in editing and annotating the Chinese texts.

Editing and annotating the non-Chinese texts and sources in Tianyi and Hengbao must have been equally challenging. These journals provided foreign-language terms, names, and titles next to their Chinese translations, but misspellings and typos abounded. Liu painstakingly verified the original sources in multiple languages—English, Japanese, German, Russian, French, and Esperanto. In addition, Hengbao attempted to provide English titles for its reports and essays. Unfortunately, the English rendering was often inaccurate and confusing. Instead of radically changing the translations, Liu tried to work with them, and her corrections have effectively tidied up the texts and enhanced their accessibility and usefulness. Liu has also clarified a great number of transcribed foreign names that are no long recognizable. Her ability to engage multilingual sources, familiarity with modern intellectual and literary history, and research expertise in comparative literature ensure the quality of these annotations.

Understandably, certain elements of these journals, such as, for example, decorative illustrations and the layout of the advertisements, cannot be reproduced in this edition. Nonetheless, the format and the various editorial decisions made by Wan and Liu help present these historical sources as faithfully to the originals as possible. Emphases were kept, and Chinese-style notes still appear in a smaller character size in the main body of the texts. The one important—but necessary—change concerns punctuation. These late-Qing journals were not punctuated, so Wan and Liu have added punctuation, making it much easier for those who are not used to reading unpunctuated Chinese sources to engage with this material. Interested readers could look up p. 5 and p. 65 in The Birth of Chinese Feminism to see sample images of unpunctuated Tianyi texts.

Lastly, some of He-Yin Zhen's most fascinating writings appeared in Tianyi, and six of her essays have been translated into English and included in The Birth of Chinese Feminism. Teachers could pair this material with Tianyi, Hengbao in graduate courses on documents, research methodology, and translation. Wan and Liu's marvelous work therefore will contribute to the study of modern China in many ways, from the pedagogical to the scientific, for many years to come.