Since its entry into the cultural and literary field of China in the early twentieth century, the Rubāʿiyyāt of Ḥakīm Omar Khayyam (1048–1131 CE) has given rise to a translational genealogy spanning more than a century and involving dozens of translators. Drawing on two analytical frameworks—mediated rewriting and the systematization of knowledge—this study examines the historical process through which Khayyam’s quatrains were received in China: a process that began with indirect translation from English and poetic recreation, and gradually developed into direct translation from Persian and scholarly-academic institutionalization.This article argues that the translational genealogy of Khayyam’s Rubāʿiyyāt in China is not merely a linear and progressive history. Rather, it constitutes a multilayered field in which translation norms, poetic imagination, and mechanisms of knowledge production have interacted, overlapped, and come into tension across different historical periods. Early translators, relying primarily on Edward FitzGerald’s English rendering, engaged in a poetic reinvention of Khayyam. Translators of the middle period, through metrical experimentation and cultural grafting, incorporated Khayyam into the process of legitimizing modern Chinese poetry. Later translators, within the discursive contexts of comparative literature and Oriental studies, reassessed his epistemic position as one of the classics of Persian literature.This genealogy reveals, on the one hand, the internal tension between rewriting and authentic rendering in the history of translation; and, on the other hand, offers a representative case of how extra-cultural literary resources are localized, legitimized, and transformed into disciplinary knowledge within modern Chinese literature.