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First Edition of Communist Manifesto Discovered
A copy of the first edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in Chinese, published in 1920, one year before the Communist Party of China was founded, was discovered recently in a warehouse in Beijing.
According to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Cultural Heritage, the copy was found in one of its warehouses for precious books.
The red cover of the Manifesto bears a portrait of Karl Marx and the names of the authors and Chinese translator. The translated names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are different from what are used today.
The Communist Manifesto was basically translated literally and some translations are different from the later versions.
The first edition is very rare today as only 1,000 copies were published at that time, according to experts on CPC archives and history.
Late Chinese leader Mao Zedong has mentioned this precious classic work many times. But none of the 1,000 copies have been discovered since 1949 when New China was founded.
Late Premier Zhou Enlai also showed concern about the whereabouts of the Manifesto in 1975 when he was already seriously ill. He was disappointed when Chen Wangdao, the translator and then president of Shanghai-based Fudan University at that time, had no idea where to find a copy.
Co-authored by Marx and Engels in 1848, the Communist Manifesto was published over one hundred times in 19 languages when the authors were still alive. The Bible-like monumental work has been translated into over 200 languages over the past 150 years.
The Chinese version was translated by Chen Wangdao as the first fully translated version in Chinese.
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