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Dr Yidan Wang, who received her BA and MA from Peking University and her PhD from Tehran University, is now a professor of Persian language and literature in the Persian Section in the Department of West Asian Studies in the School of Foreign Languages at Peking University in China. She also serves as the director of the Institute of Iranian Culture Studies at Peking University. Her main research interests focus on the cultural exchanges and relations between China and Iran during the 9th-15th centuries, especially during the Mongol-Yuan period.
As a Persian philologist, her first book was published in Persian entitled Tārīkh-i Chīn az Jāmi‘ al-Tavārīkh (An Annotation of the History of China and Cathay in The Collection of Histories) (Tehran, 2000), based on her doctoral dissertation on Rashīd al-Dīn Hamadānī (1247-1318), an eminent Persian historian of the Il-Khanid Dynasty. Her second book A Study and Collated Translation of Rashīd al-Dīn’s History of China in Jāmi‘ al-Tavārīkh was published in Chinese (Beijing, 2006). She is also the translator of several Persian literary works, such as the Chinese translation of Iranian Myths and Legends (Beijing, 1999), Iranian Folktales (Shenyang, 2001), the forth volume of the Masnavī-yi Ma‘navī of Rumi (Changsha, 2002) and The Quatrains (Rubaiyat) of Omar Khayyam (Tehran, 2010). She has more than 20 articles on Persian literature or on the cross cultural communications between China and Iran, including 'Mushk-i Khutan (The Musk of Hotan)' (in Persian, 1993), 'Rashid al-Din’s Contribution to the Study of Chinese Culture' (in English, 2009), 'Iranian Constitutional Revolution as Reported in Chinese Press' (in English, 2010), 'A Comparative Study of Rashid al-Din's Tanksuqnama and Its Chinese Sources' (in English, 2013) and 'On Boluo Chengxiang in the Il-khanid Dynasty: a Research Based on Persian Sources' (in Chinese, 2015), etc. In recent years she has been engaged in a research on Rashīd al-Dīn’s another work the Shu‘ab-i Panjgāna ('The Five Genealogies').
As a professor of Persian literature and philology, Dr Wang's research interest focuses on Persian historical documents concerning China which are invaluable for the study of cross-cultural communication in the medieval world, particularly the works of Rashīd al-Dīn (1247–1318), a Persian historian and physician of the Il-Khanid Dynasty, such as Jāmi‘ al-Tavārīkh (Collection of Histories), Tanksūqnāma-yi Īl-khān dar Funūn-i ‘Ulūm-i Khitāyī (Treasure Book of the Ilkhān’s on Science and Technology in China) and Shu‘ab-i Panjgāna (Five Genealogies). Since 2011, she has been researching the Shu‘ab-i Panjgāna, i.e., the genealogical trees of the five groups of people in Eurasia, including the Mongols, the Arabs, the Israelites, the Christians and Franks, and the Chinese. This project aims to publish a collated text of this historical work with translation, annotations and remarks. To achieve this aim, it is necessary to examine the text with Rashīd al-Dīn’s other extant works. Being a Visiting Research Fellow at IAS will be a rare chance for her to access the Persian manuscripts kept in the UK. She will therefore visit the libraries where the manuscripts of Rashīd al-Dīn’s works are kept (the British Library, the Bodleian Library and Edinburgh University), make detailed investigation of them and compare them with the text of the Shu‘ab-i Panjgāna. Meanwhile, she will develop her networks of UK specialists of Persian philology, Sinology and Eurasian cross-cultural study, and collect relevant sources for the genealogical history.
