Eva Lüdi Kong spent 17 years on the German translation of „Journey to the West“, one of four great classics of Chinese literature. The work was as groundbreaking for East Asian culture as Dante’s „Divine Comedy“ once was for Europe. This was probably why no one before Lüdi Kong had dared to fully translate the epoch-making novel into German. All Publishers the 52-year-old Swiss author approached had declared the project as „too ambitious.“ Nevertheless, the sinologist, who first came to China in the early 1990s at the age of 21, continued to work relentlessly – following a feeling of „inner necessity and meaningfulness“, as she says.