When was Machiavelli's Art of War first translated into Chinese?

Question

Bookeater recently asked when Sun Zi's Art of War was first adopted outside China. However, Sun Zi was not the only author who wrote a treatise on this topic. Machiavelli wrote Dell'arte della guerra / The Art of War around 1519-1520 and it was the only of his theoretical works that was printed during his lifetime.

My question is a bit like the reverse of Bookeater's question: When was Machiavelli's treatise The Art of War first translated into Chinese? A simple web search did not help; I find mostly links about translations of Sun Zi's treatise ... Doing a search for 翻译 (the Chinese word for "translation") on the Chinese Wikipedia article about Machiavelli gives no results. A search in Chinese brings up pages that I can't read with my basic level of Chinese.

I happen to know Chinese, and after finding no results on either WorldCat.org or the National Library of Taiwan website, I'm forced to conclude that it was never translated into Chinese; the Chinese title given on the Chinese Wikipedia page seems to be a rendering of convenience. — CJ Sheu, Jul 10 '18 at 07:48
If you make some screenshots of search results from relevant library catalogues (also from mainland China), I'll think you can write up a valid answer. — Tsundoku, Jul 25 '18 at 14:46
Thanks for your vote of confidence, but I hesitate to answer without a smoking gun. — CJ Sheu, Jul 25 '18 at 15:46
@CJSheu There appears to be a translation published by The Commercial Press in 2012. I found it using this seach query: 马基雅维利兵法翻译 — Tsundoku, Dec 31 '22 at 13:44

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 31 '22 at 13:52

The DuckDuckGo search 马基雅维利兵法翻译 (literally: Machiavelli Art of War translation) gave the following page as the first search result: 兵法 - 尼科洛•马基雅维里.pdf. The page contains a preview of a Chinese translation of Machiavelli's Art of War published by The Commercial Press in Beijing in 2012 (ISBN 978-7-100-09531-0).

Since CJ Sheu's searches on WorldCat.org and in the National Library of Taiwan's online catalogue got no results, I will assume that the above translation is the first one.

When was Machiavelli's Art of War first translated into Chinese?

1 Answers1