Chiang Yee was born into a wealthy, middle-class family in the district of JiuJiang in Jiangxi Province, south-west China in 1903. He immigrated to England to study in 1933, where he lived and worked until 1955 and, as a Chinese exile, he became a significant cultural ambassador in his new homeland, as a teacher, artist and curator. Developing as a painter in watercolours, his most popular works were the 'Silent Traveller’ illustrated series of books, the first of which, subtitled ‘A Chinese Artist in Lakeland’, was published in 1937, followed by 'The Silent Traveller in London' in 1938.
Poet and artist Chiang Yee was born into a wealthy landowning family in the district of JiuJiang in Jiangxi Province, south-east China in 1903. He graduated with a degree in Chemistry from the National Southeastern University in Nanking in 1926 and lectured in chemistry at the National Chengchi University in Taipei for a short period. Although he was not from an artistic background, his traditional education helped his journey to becoming a talented artist and poet.
In 1933 Chiang moved to England because of his opposition to the developing political situation in China. He initially intended to stay for just a few years, studying for an MSc in Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE), before returning home; hence, his wife Zeng Yun and their four children remained in China. However, the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937 made travel back to China impossible, and the subsequent political upheaval in his homeland meant that Chiang was unable to return. He therefore remained in England, where he lived and worked for more than 20 years, until 1955, becoming a Chinese exile who was a significant cultural ambassador in his new homeland. During the 1930s he engaged in a wide variety of cultural and educational activities: from 1935-38, he taught Chinese language at the School of Oriental Studies (now the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS), University of London, after which he spent two years working at the Wellcome Museum of Anatomy and Pathology, in charge of the Chinese collections. Simultaneously, Chiang began to exhibit his watercolours in London; these were executed in a traditional Chinese style, but the subject matter was chiefly British. He managed to bring the new perspective of an ‘outsider’ to his vision. Although few Chinese artists, including Chiang himself, came to London at this time specifically to study at art school (preferring the modernist centres of Paris and Berlin), he hosted many distinguished creatives, such as Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu, in his flat in Hampstead, which he shared with Xiong Shuyi, the first Chinese playwright to direct a West End play (Anna Wu, The Silent Traveller: Chiang Yee in Britain 1933-55, V&A Online Journal Issue No. 4 Summer 2012).
Chiang wrote and illustrated many books inspired by his various explorative journeys, using the pen name ‘Yaxingzhe’ or ‘Silent Traveller’ (Chiang Yee, The Chinese Eye: An Interpretation of Chinese painting. London: Methuen, 1935: 70-72). While books written by Westerners detailing their travels through the East were commonplace, Chiang's initiative to portray the West from an Eastern perspective succeeded in impressing many scholars and art critics. His most popular illustrated travelogues were the 'Silent Traveller’ series, a total of 12 books recording his journeys, initially around Britain and latterly in many other parts of the world during the turbulent years of the Second World War. The series includes A Chinese Artist in Lakeland, published in 1937, a slim volume describing Chiang's two week journey in 1936 through the region, divided into five chapters, each dedicated to a different lake and surrounding area; and The Silent Traveller in London (1938), reviewed in The Observer by Laurence Binyon, English poet and former curator at the British Museum. A special first edition was produced by renowned bookbinder, Leighton Straker. Spread throughout the publications are Chiang’s own sketches and watercolour illustrations along with his poetry, directly inspired by his surroundings. Yee also published The Silent Traveller in Wartime (1939), in which he expressed his anti-Nazi convictions; The Silent Traveller in the Yorkshire Dales (1941) and The Silent Traveller in Oxford (1944). After the war ended, he continued the series more widely, to include Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and Boston, USA, concluding in 1972 with The Silent Traveller in Japan. In England Yee also published books on the natural world, on traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, and wrote and illustrated several children's books for Puffin. As an observer, Chiang Yee was a political exile who in London experienced another kind of exile, and the latter is what appears to make him an artist (Emily Cleaver, 'The Silent Traveller: An Outsider's Perspective of Britain, 1933-1955', Litro Magazine, 2012).
In 1955 Chiang migrated again, to the USA, where he continued his varied career, holding posts at Columbia University, New York (where he was an associate professor) and at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, where he became honorary curator of Chinese ethnology. However, in his seventies, after spending over 40 years away from his homeland, Chiang Yee died in Beijing, China, on a day variously recorded as 7 or 26 October 1977. His tomb is situated on Mount Lu above his hometown, integrated onto the landscape and the natural environment that so influenced his paintings over the years. Chiang Yee's work is represented in UK public collections, including the British Museum, Royal Collection and Wellcome Collections, London.