"This thesis studies a Chinese rendition of Aesop’s Fables in nineteenth century China. Yishi Yuyan, known in English as Esop’s Fables: written in Chinese by the Learned Mun Mooy Seen-Shang, and compiled in their present form (with a free and a literal translation) by his pupil Sloth, was published amid the Opium War in 1840. The work, as stated in the preface, was meant to be a primer for English learners of Chinese, but it acquired at the same time a wide local readership despite being censored by the Chinese authority soon after publication and listed in the Index Expurgatorius. Firmly shunning the sterile dichotomist notion of ‘linguistic versus cultural translation’, the present study will explore more comprehensively the rendition as a converse between two distinct cultures in their early encounter by comparative textual analyses and a probe into the cultural intricacies behind the practice of translation. It will establish that the amateurish collaboration between the ‘foreign devil’ and his ‘Chinese helper’, as it happened so often then, was the best means available toward some salubrious degree of intercultural understanding, with their respective ‘horizons’ inevitably predetermining the composition of the work. The purpose, and hence the core value of this thesis, is to exposit the complexity of perception and reception of the self and the other by dissimilar cultures as refracted in the translation."