Rewriting History in Two Tongues: Shih‐I Hsiung's <i>The Bridge of Heaven</i> (1943) and <i>Tianqiao</i> (1960)

ABSTRACT This article argues that Shih‐I Hsiung's The Bridge of Heaven (1943) and Tianqiao (1960) together constitute a bilingual continuum of historical rewriting through which diasporic Chinese modernism binds diplomatic mediation to historiographic reclamation across imperial and Sinophone contexts. Written in wartime London, The Bridge of Heaven enacts diplomatic mediation by securing China's cultural visibility within an imperial regime of legibility shaped by Allied wartime discourse. Its narrative architecture and paratextual design reframe late‐Qing reform and revolution as a process of historical agency rather than a static cultural spectacle, converting externally imposed legibility into narrative control. Seventeen years later, Tianqiao , produced in colonial Hong Kong under the conditions of serial publication and a historically attentive readership, realises historiographic reclamation by reorienting the same historical materials toward Sinophone readers shaped by migration and colonial pedagogy. The Chinese version expands revolutionary narration, restores provincial specificity, and incorporates archival materials accumulated over decades within a reconfigured horizon of address. Read together, the two versions articulate bilingual resistance as a historically situated textual practice that links diplomatic mediation to historiographic reclamation across languages. The article thus advances historical rewriting as an alternative axis of modernist innovation beyond canonical paradigms of formal rupture.