When Aesop became a Chinese language teacher: Robert Thom's Yishi yuyan 意拾喻言, its pedagogical agenda and legacy in modern China

Since antiquity, Aesop’s fables have played a central role in linguistic and moral education, a function consolidated in Europe and later transmitted to East Asia through early modern missionary activity. Introduced to China and Japan by Jesuit missionaries from the 17th century onward, the fables were initially deployed as rhetorical and proselytising tools, most notably in humanistic publications by Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni, Nicolas Trigault and other Jesuit authors. Despite its significance as one of the earliest Western literary works translated into Chinese, this missionary framing limited the genre’s long-term reception in China. Aesop’s fables re-emerged in the 19th century in a significantly different pedagogical context with Robert Thom’s Yishi yuyan 意拾喻言(1838–1840), produced during the First Opium War and explicitly conceived as a tool for Chinese language instruction. This chapter argues that Yishi yuyan represents a turning point in the use of Aesop in China. Departing from earlier rhetorical and religious applications, Thom repurposed the fables to foster syntactic, stylistic, and idiomatic competence in Chinese, thereby redefining translation as a pedagogical practice. By situating Thom’s work within his broader commitment to language education and engaging with the transforming function of literature and the mengxue 蒙學tradition, this study sheds new light on the role of Aesopian fables in modern Chinese educational history.