Two James Joyce-themed stage productions have recently played to capacity houses in major Chinese cities, as part of a cultural exchange programme between the UK and China.
The first, A Journey Round James Joyce, is a reimagining of Joyce's life in Trieste between 1905 and 1915, performed in Chinese by Chinese actors.
The second, Ulysses, is a revival of Dermot Bolger's English language adaptation, A Dublin Bloom, performed in English with Chinese surtitles.
The two productions have performed to capacity houses in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Jinan.
The first third of Joyce's monumental, final novel, Finnegans Wake, was published in Chinese in Shanghai in 2013, seven years after translator Dai Congrong had agreed to work on the project.
According to a Guardian report, it appeared between "luxuriously silky dark-green boards, heavy with pages of explanatory notes", and became "an immediate commercial success".
In 1982, a state official commenting on the centenary of Joyce's birth described Leopold Bloom and his Dublin milieu as "shocking in its pettiness, obscurity, ugliness, and confusion" and as emblematic of "the decadence of the modern bourgeoisie".
Yet things had markedly changed by 1996, when two versions of Ulysses could be freely read by Chinese citizens, as the new bourgeoisie element began to demand Western sophistication.
The five-floor Xinhua bookshop in Beijing currently has four different editions of Ulysses, one in English, and three in Chinese.
Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the play Exiles and Finnegans Wake are also on sale.
