Yeh Chun Chan signs his autograph for a reader in the 1940s.[Photo provided to China Daily]

A photographic exhibition marking the life of Chinese translator Yeh Chun Chan was launched on Tuesday by the University of Cambridge.

Born in 1914 in a remote village in central China's Hubei province, Yeh came to England in 1944 to work for the British Wartime Propaganda Ministry, giving numerous speeches and broadcasts on the B.B.C., to inform the British about China's anti-Japanese efforts.

At the end of the war he went to King's College, Cambridge, where he spent four years studying literature, meeting many leading figures in art, literature and translation, and writing his first autobiographical novel in English.

Yeh returned to China in 1949 and for the next thirty years he translated many works from European languages, including Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, before his death at the age of 85 in 1999.

"Yeh was a geographical bridge between China and the West in both directions," Professor Alan Macfarlane, curator of the exhibition, said on the opening ceremony which attended by Liu Xiaoming, Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom, Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the university, and Yeh's family.

Macfarlane wrote in the exhibition's preface that Yeh brought news of China to the West during the Second World War, starting his co-operation with western scholars through his friendship with Julian Bell, a nephew of Virginia Woolf, at Wuhan University in 1936. Then, on his return, he took the West to China through his translations from twelve European languages.

The photographic exhibition runs from 20th July to the end of August 2015 in King's College antechapel.

The exhibition is held with the permission and support of the Provost, Dean and Fellows of King's College, Cambridge. It is part of the events to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the completion of King's College Chapel in 1515.

The exhibition is held in association with King's College Archive Centre, the Cambridge Rivers Project (University of Cambridge), the Vanishing Worlds Foundation, Wuhan University (China) Archive Centre and Yeh Chun Chan's family.