Legge's central project, The Chinese Classics, appeared in five volumes between 1861 and 1872, giving English readers full, heavily annotated translations of the Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the works of Mencius, the Book of Documents and the Spring and Autumn Annals with its Zuo commentary. He went on to contribute several volumes to Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East series, including a translation of the Yi Jing in 1882 and, in 1891, the Daoist classics, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi among them.
His Yi Jing translation in particular underlies much of how the text was first read in English and stands behind the classical material the atlas carries on the Chinese Classics and their associated Hexagram content. Modern sinology has revised or superseded parts of his interpretation, and his framing of Confucian thought through a missionary's comparative lens has drawn sustained scholarly criticism, but because his translations entered the public domain they remained in print and in wide use long after more technically current versions existed, and they are still consulted today. His Oxford students carried the translations forward into the next generation of British sinology, and because the volumes were never restricted by copyright once their original terms lapsed, they were reprinted cheaply and widely well into the twentieth century, well past the point at which more technically current scholarship had appeared.