Twenty Five Years in Qingdao

Richard Wilhelm was born on 10 May 1873 in Stuttgart, in the German Empire. He trained as a Protestant theologian and was sent by a missionary society to the German controlled port city of Qingdao in China in 1899, where he remained for the better part of twenty five years, running a school and hospital and immersing himself in Chinese language and classical thought far more deeply than most of his missionary contemporaries. He came to admire Chinese civilization enough that his own later writing describes his work there as an attempt at genuine cultural exchange rather than one directional conversion.

In Qingdao he formed a close working relationship with the Chinese scholar Lao Naixuan, a former imperial official displaced by the 1911 revolution, who tutored him in the classical texts and traditional commentary. Together they began translating the I Ching in 1913, working steadily through the classic and its layered commentarial tradition until completing the translation in 1921; it was published in German in 1924. Wilhelm returned to Germany in the 1920s, became professor of Chinese studies at the University of Frankfurt, and founded and directed its China Institute until his death on 1 March 1930.