Abstract: The earliest English translator of the Ming fiction Xiyouji or Journey to the West is claimed by scholars to be Samuel I. Woodbridge, an American missionary to China, who published his translation in 1895, under the title The Golden-Horned Dragon King, or The Emperor’s Visit to the Spirit World. This paper demonstrates that the original text of Woodbridge’s translation is neither a so-called Chinese literary pamphlet edited by Samuel Wells Williams, nor Xiyouji, but the third book of the “Thirteen and a Half Sacred Books”, a series of scripts of Tongzi Drama in Nantong, Jiangsu Province. The title is “Yuan Tiangang Predicts Rain and the Beheading of the Dragon King,” and the manuscript kept by a Tongzi actor named Hu Xiping is closest to the one used by Woodbridge. Although the “Sacred Books” and Xiyouji both contain stories about the Dragon King being decapitated for transgressing Heaven’s decrees and Tang Taizong’s visit to the Underworld, there are huge differences as to specific plots and image of characters, and Woodbridge was familiar with both of these works. In order to enable the missionaries to better understand the working of the Chinese mind and inspire them to convert the Chinese heathens, Woodbridge chose to translate the “Sacred Books” instead of Xiyouji, and making full use of the original story, presented an image of China as a country of political corruption, moral depravity and religious ignorance by means of the translation proper and the paratexts.