James Legge

James Legge was born on 20 December 1815 in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Trained for the Congregationalist ministry, he was sent out by the London Missionary Society in 1839, working first at its Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca and then, from 1843, at the college's relocated site in the new British colony of Hong Kong, where he served as principal for many years.

His missionary duties gave him direct, sustained exposure to classical Chinese literature and to the scholars who could read it with him, and he leaned on Chinese collaborators throughout his working life, most substantially the reformer and scholar Wang Tao, who assisted him for years in Hong Kong and later in Scotland while Legge prepared his translations. In 1873 Legge returned to Britain, and in 1876 the newly created chair of Chinese at Oxford was given to him, the first such professorship in Britain. He held it until his death on 29 November 1897, having spent the last two decades of his life consolidating a body of translation that outlasted him by a century. His scholarship rested on an unusual working method for its time: rather than translating alone from a dictionary, he read each classical text through with Chinese teachers and collaborators, producing versions checked against native scholarly interpretation rather than against European sinology alone, a method that shaped both the reliability and the particular voice of his English translations.

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 Modern sinology has revised or superseded parts of his interpretation, and his framing of Confucian thought through a missionary's comparative lens has drawn sustained scholarly criticism, but because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.