In his 1992 analysis of rewriting practices, translation studies scholar André Lefevere made constant use of the concept of 'image', explaining how authors of rewritten works created images of certain realities, and that these images always achieved a greater impact than the realities from which they originated and with which they inevitably competed. Produced within an ideological system that necessarily reorients their meaning, images always distort or give a new shape to their sources. This possibility of giving a new form to a reality is even what motivates their production. Andre Lefevere focused his interest on questions of interlingual translation, where the issue of “faithfulness” is critical, in relation to language, texts or images. But it is also possible to take up this concept of “image” of a text in the field of intralingual translation and, more generally, in that of the writing of texts produced, in whole or in part, as rewritings of other texts. This can be seen in premodern fiction and drama, particularly in what are known as "novels and plays on current events" (shishi xiaoshuo 時事小說, shishi qu 時事曲), a genre that generated a large number of works during the Ming-Qing transition. Numerous works then set out to give an account of contemporary events. In doing so, they competed with historians and constantly relied on the latter's work or on documented political and administrative sources. These novels and plays, which were highly popular with the public, did much to spread knowledge of the important events of the time, such as the abuses of Wei Zhongxian 魏忠賢, the rebellion led by Li Zicheng 李自成 and the expansion of the Manchus. This knowledge is resolutely romanticized and, as a result, distorts the reality it describes. But it is sometimes considered so faithful to the reality of the facts reported that some of these “fictions” have in turn served as sources for later historians. The “images” of the facts produced by these novels did indeed end up having a greater impact than their sources. This paper looks in particular at the way in which official, historical and actual documents, such as imperial decrees, memorials to the throne, information from administrative gazettes, etc., have been treated in these “fictions”. We shall see how such documents, even if they are endowed with archival value, are not spared the fate of becoming “images” of their original version in the process of recontextualisation in which they are placed. This contribution uses the concept of image in a figurative, metaphorical sense, that of the projection of a reality onto something that is its double, its reproduction, but which nevertheless differs from it, thus creating an intersemiotic distance.