This heartening volume tells readers how Ovid's Cupid can be made to laugh in Chinese, how an Ovidian sense of courtship seeped into new discourses around love in twentieth-century China, how artists in eighteenth-century Canton laboured to decorate porcelain with scenes from Graeco-Roman myth, and how the eternal challenges of translation manifest idiosyncratically in Chinese, as encountered by current participants in the Shanghai Ovid Project. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book constitutes a field report from a lively, developing scene of classical studies in China and South-East Asia, and presents signposts to future investigations. There are, of course, useful case studies in these pages, of how old Latin texts have been transmitted to modern China, but the collection does more. The reader understands how various academic debates converge around Ovid's Chinese reception, including those on comparative poetics and the fate of Classics as a discipline in – what might not have occurred to many Classicists as a fertile environment – twenty-first-century China.

Initially the book addresses the reasonable question of how Ovid, of all authors, achieved prominence in China. The classical texts that Europeans brought to China were usually those that could contribute to proselytising activities by offering points of comparison with Confucianism or by portraying the European character in a flattering light. Mindful that Jesuit missionaries – the primary conveyors of Europe's classical culture to Asia – appear unlikely champions for the chronicler of pagan myth and tongue-in-cheek seduction wisdom, F.H. Mutschler's and S.S. Li's respective essays discuss the emergence of Ovid studies in China from the beginning, if understandably finding it difficult to account for that interest neatly. Mutschler locates Ovid within the broad history of European Classics in China. Following the cues of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, early Chinese readers of Graeco-Roman classics preferred Greek material, as the fount of European culture. Latin was seen as derivative, although Ovid's anthologisation of myth in Metamorphoses undoubtedly made him a useful source. Chinese attention to Ovid seems to have advanced not steadily but in key spurts of interest and unlikely episodes: among the Jesuits there were those who brought the naughty books from their leisure reading. Much later there was a Chinese scholar who learned Latin in Russia. Such disciples exemplify, Mutschler points out, a shift from a ‘political-patriotic interest in Western antiquity’ to ‘cultural-humanist’ pursuits among Chinese readers (p. 26). One instance of the latter is Dai Wangshu's 1929 prose rendition of Ars amatoria, the first complete translation of an Ovidian text into Chinese. Unfortunately, precise information on Chinese print-runs and readerships is elusive. It is difficult to discern how many Chinese readers Ovid had from the first publication of complete translations in the twentieth century, although subsequent essays in this book make fair cases for Ovid's cultural impact in China.

With a narrower focus on the late-Ming period, Li's chapter establishes debts to Metamorphoses in Alfonso Vagnone's Sinophone Ancient Words for Encouragement (1632) and to Ars amatoria in (fellow S.J.) Martino Martini's Chinese-language treatise on friendship (drafted in 1647). After Matteo Ricci's example, such texts attempt to introduce European ideals of interpersonal relations to a Confucianist mindset, accentuating compatibility with principles that find their ultimate expression, to the Jesuit visitors, in Christianity. Here the Ovidian presences are fleeting; despite Vagnone's allusion to Actaeon, Plutarch is his key source, and, Li writes, ‘one doubts whether the Ovidian myth truly interested the Italian Jesuit’ (p. 56). Hence the snippets from Ovid in each work occasion analysis of the anecdote-based texts that sought to reassure Ming scholars about the European arrivals and to lure them into engagement with the foreign textual traditions. This is fascinating material, although this reader would have welcomed more consideration of how the European ideas might interact with Chinese concepts – for example, whether quotation from a historical personage imbues an anecdote with authority in Chinese tradition, at the expense of, say, the space given to explaining chreiai. This detail exemplifies a quirk of the volume overall, with some essays assuming the need to explain Graeco-Roman classical concepts rather than Chinese, and others the inverse, although the introduction says that the ‘volume is intended for readers in diverse disciplines and language backgrounds’, and the ideas are generally accessible (p. 15).

Various essays examine individual instances of translation. Some of these are attuned to Ovid's presence in Chinese historical moments, such as C. Wang's suggestive and short piece on a letter published in The Canton Press, which, amid the 1830's opium crisis, finds a figure for Britain's impolitic behaviour in a Chinese translation of the scene of Phaethon dropping the reins in Metamorphoses 2.63–71. Thus ‘someone with the pseudonym “Britannicus” sharply criticized Charles Elliott, the Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China for his imprudence in dealing with local officials’ (p. 110). Thereafter Wang attempts to identify Britannicus, where consideration of how the Ovidian episode would have resonated with its Chinese readership might have been more valuable. Britannicus was, after all, turning the Britons’ supposed master-culture against them. By contrast, there is more discussion of local reception where X. Xiao and Y. Bao write on Dai's Chinese translation (via French) of Ars amatoria into Aijing (‘Love Classic’) and how that text's ideas of courtship informed Chinese reconsiderations of love amid the upheavals that followed the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the onset of Chinese Republicanism. The publication was opportunistic, ‘aiming to attract the growing population of the “petty urbanites” who had been fervent readers of popular sentimental love stories in the past two decades’ (p. 122). In a later chapter Xiao pursues the question of how China accommodated the risqué aspects of Ovid, with advice on seduction configured as quasi-feminism by a Chinese imitator whom Xiao likens to a modern pick-up artist (pp. 206–7). P.Y. Chia and S.J. Green's essay, conversely, finds that the thoughts on make-up application offered in Medicamina faciei femineae might make more sense to Chinese than to Anglophone readers.

The question of who Ovid was to a Chinese reader arises implicitly in the various discussions of Ars amatoria and more directly in chapters such as C. Liu's study of Heroides. Liu refers to Chinese verses of lamentation to establish traditional poetics that prescribe authorial sincerity, allowing the use of personae (for example, a male writer speaking as a female character), but assuming that the emotion of the work is sincere. Hence a reader approaching Ovid from the Chinese canon would interpret Heroides as articulating the poet's sorrow at exile, because it would be unthinkable for a poet to affect that degree of sentiment. Yet J. Liu notes that ‘exile poetry is permeated with intricacies and subtleties that defy monolithic or conclusive reading’ (p. 298) and which pose further difficulties to approximate in Mandarin tonality, and indeed to a readership that would not expect the emperor to be the subject of sardonic humour. C. Shi makes a comparison with Su Shi, banished twice by the Northern Song court and thereafter ‘compulsively revisiting and bemoaning his fate like Ovid’ (p. 329). Each sought comfort, unsuccessfully, in writing. Such observations – as do, in very different ways, Wang's comparisons of the use of the calendar as structural principle in Fasti to the classical Chinese Spring and Autumn Annals – indicate Ovid's usefulness to diversely themed studies of comparative civilisations.

Motley's and Sienkewicz's generously illustrated essays on porcelain broaden the reach of the collection. The contributions take us into the realm of material culture and, in so doing, also demonstrate that the study of Ovid and China exceeds the unilateral flow of ideas from Europe into Chinese Asia: at times there existed exchanges back-and-forth over great distances. During the eighteenth century those Europeans who wanted, and could afford, porcelain decorated with images from Ovid's work were required to commission individual works for production in Canton. The process of sending instructions and receiving the completed work from China took years, ‘racier images’, Motley tells us, ‘being popular on the interior lids of snuff boxes’ (p. 78). Several extant pieces reproduce Bernard Picart's illustrations to Metamorphoses; intriguing as Picart also undertook a similar process in reverse, using materials obtained from Asia to engrave images of Chinese worship for Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723–37). A further correspondence lies in the Ovidian character of Wedgwood chinoiserie, which this collection helps to explain. In his chapter on punchbowls Sienkewicz has an eye for artistry and is attentive to the accuracy and intentional deviations of Chinese painters from their source material: ‘a comparison of the scenes on these bowls with the engravings upon which they are based illustrates the care with which the Chinese artists followed their European models and, at the same time, how these artists found some opportunity for self-expression in details, such as facial features and background objects’ (p. 90).

Overall, the book gives cultural history as context for Ovid's Sinophone reception from the initial Jesuit efforts to the experiment of the Yale-NUS liberal-arts college in Singapore. In historical coverage the collection is strangely quiet on the mid- to late-twentieth century. K. Zhai mentions that Yang Zhouhan translated part of Metamorphoses in 1958, and the confiscation of Miao's manuscript translation in 1967 (pp. 223–5). The fate of Ovid during the Cultural Revolution may make for depressing reading, but it would be helpful to join the dots by sharing some of the proclamations against Western Classics during that period.

The essay by Liu, one of the editors of the volume, can be read as a centrepiece that portrays the general scene of translating Latin into Chinese as a starting-point. Liu sides with Z. Torlone's opinion that translation should accentuate the idiosyncrasy of an original work rather than its universality. In practice this means that the translators avoid reaching for loose equivalents of Ovidian formulations in Chinese idioms, or other procedures that would ‘domesticate’ the text or render it in Chinese vernacular. In turn, this policy can place great burden on textual commentaries to bridge cultural division. There is, of course, no correct answer, although it is fascinating to learn how the contributing translators have solved particular lexical puzzles to help make Ovid a more readily understood figure in China, but no less Roman.