Helen Wang


Helen Kay Wang is an English sinologist and translator. She works as curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum in London. She has also published a number of literary translations from Chinese, including an award-winning translation of a Chinese children's book.

Biography

Wang has a BA in Chinese from SOAS University of London. She has a PhD in archaeology from University College London, titled "Money on the Silk Road: the evidence from Eastern Central Asia to c. AD 800", 2002.
In 1991 Wang joined the British Museum staff as an assistant to Joe Cribb in the Asian section of the Department of Coins and Medals. She became Curator of East Asian Money in 1993. Her work mostly relates to the collections for which she is responsible, collection history and development of the field, in particular East Asian numismatics, Silk Road Numismatics, Sir Aurel Stein and his collections, and textiles as money. She was joint Honorary Secretary of the Royal Numismatic Society from 2011-2016, Hon. Vice President from 2018, and is an honorary member of the editorial board of Zhongguo Qianbi 《中国钱币》, the journal of the China Numismatic Society. She was elected as an individual member of the International Association for the Study of Silk Road Textiles in 2016. In 2017, she started a web-resource .
Wang was married to Chinese archaeologist Wang Tao, with whom she has two children.

Literary translations

Wang's first published literary translations were in the early 1990s – short stories and essays by Yu Hua, Zhang Chengzhi, Ma Yuan, Du Ma and Zhang Langlang. After a long break, she returned to translation in the 2010s, translating more short stories, essays and children's books. She also works collaboratively with the,, . In 2016, she co-founded the group with Anna Gustafsson Chen and . From 2012-2015 she was a Member of the Committee of the Translators Association. While on the committee, she independently started TranslatedWorld and initiated the #NameTheTranslator hashtag in December 2013.. She has been on the judging panel of four of the Project's Bai Meigui Chinese translation competitions.

Awards and commendations

Selected publications (books, edited and co-edited volumes)

  • 2023 Look at the Coins! Papers in Honour of Joe Cribb on his 75th Birthday - this includes Wang's own paper "The Canton Ransom – What Happened to the Six Million Dollars of Silver?"
  • 2022 Chinese Numismatics. The World of Chinese Money
  • 2021 Asia Collections in Museums outside Asia: Questioning Artefacts, Cultures and Identities, Transcultural Perspectives 2020, issue 1, thematic issue in Kunsttexte. Humboldt University. Berlin.
  • 2013 Textiles as Money on the Silk Road
  • 2012 Sir Aurel Stein, Colleagues and Collections
  • 2012 The Music of Ink
  • 2010 A Catalogue of the Japanese Coin Collection at the British Museum, with special reference to Kutsuki Masatsuna
  • 2008 Chairman Mao Badges: Symbols and Slogans of the Cultural Revolution
  • 2008 Handbook to the Collections of Sir Aurel Stein in the UK
  • 2007 Catalogue of the Collections of Sir Aurel Stein in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and its Supplement
  • 2007 Textiles from Dunhuang in UK Collections
  • 2004 Money on the Silk Road: The Evidence from Eastern Central Asia to c. AD 800, with a catalogue of the coins collected by Sir Aurel Stein
  • 2004 ''Sir Aurel Stein in The Times''

Book-length translations (novels)