Helen Kay Wang (néeBelow; simplified Chinese: 汪海岚; traditional Chinese: 汪海嵐; pinyin: Wāng Hǎilán; born 1965) is an English sinologist and translator.[1] She works as curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum in London. She has also published a number of literary translations from Chinese, including an award-winning translation of a Chinese children's book.
In 1991 Wang joined the British Museum staff as an assistant to Joe Cribb in the Asian section of the Department of Coins and Medals.[5] She became Curator of East Asian Money in 1993. Her work mostly relates to the collections for which she is responsible, collection history and development of the field, in particular East Asian numismatics, Silk Road Numismatics, Sir Aurel Stein and his collections, and textiles as money. She was joint Honorary Secretary of the Royal Numismatic Society from 2011-2016, Hon. Vice President from 2018,[6] and is an honorary member of the editorial board of Zhongguo Qianbi 《中国钱币》 (China Numismatics), the journal of the China Numismatic Society. She was elected as an individual member of the International Association for the Study of Silk Road Textiles (IASSRT) in 2016.[7] In 2017, she started a web-resource Chinese Money Matters.[8]
2023 ALSC Notable Children's Books - for Dragonfly Eyes [ALSC = Association for Library Service to Children][15]
2023 Dragonfly Eyes received a 2022 Freeman Young Adult/Middle School Literature "Of Note" Award[16]
2023 Playing with Lanterns by Wang Yage, illus. Zhu Chengliang, tr. Helen Wang (Amazon Crossing 2022) selected for the 2023 Notable Social Studies Trade Books list, a joint project of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the Children’s Book Council.[17]
2021 Asia Collections in Museums outside Asia: Questioning Artefacts, Cultures and Identities, Transcultural Perspectives 2020, issue 1, thematic issue in Kunsttexte. Humboldt University. Berlin. (online publication, open-access) (co-ed. with Iside Carbone)[29]
2013 Textiles as Money on the Silk Road (co-ed. with Valerie Hansen, 2013)[30]
2012 Sir Aurel Stein, Colleagues and Collections (ed., 2012)[31]
2012 The Music of Ink (Saffron Books)
2010 A Catalogue of the Japanese Coin Collection (pre-Meiji) at the British Museum, with special reference to Kutsuki Masatsuna (co-ed. with Shin'ichi Sakuraki, Peter Kornicki, with Nobuhisa Furuta, Timon Screech and Joe Cribb, 2010)[32]
2008 Chairman Mao Badges: Symbols and Slogans of the Cultural Revolution (2008)[33]
2008 Handbook to the Collections of Sir Aurel Stein in the UK (co-ed. with John Perkins, 2008)[34]
2007 Catalogue of the Collections of Sir Aurel Stein in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (co-ed. with Eva Apor, 2007),[35] and its Supplement (co-ed. with Eva Apor, 2009)[36]
2007 Textiles from Dunhuang in UK Collections (co-ed. with Zhao Feng and others, 2007)[37]
2004 Money on the Silk Road: The Evidence from Eastern Central Asia to c. AD 800, with a catalogue of the coins collected by Sir Aurel Stein (2004)[38]
^Published in Henry Y.H. Zhao (ed.), The Lost Boat: Avant-garde Fiction from China (Wellsweep Press, 1993); and Henry Y.H. Zhao and John Cayley (eds), Under-sky Underground (Wellsweep Press, London, 1994)
^Abrahamsen, Eric. "Helen Wang". Paper Republic. Retrieved 5 December 2017.
