Honored translator Sidney Shapiro dies

Lifetime's work spent extolling the rich traditional virtue of China

Sidney Shapiro, a famed US-born translator who was one of the few Westerners to gain Chinese citizenship and become a member of the nation's top advisory body, died at the weekend in Beijing, his granddaughter said. He was 98.

Shapiro was born in New York in 1915 and first came to China in 1947, after being selected by the US army to learn Chinese during World War II.