James Legge

James Legge (1815–1897) was a Scottish missionary and sinologist, born in Huntly, Aberdeenshire. Sent abroad by the London Missionary Society, he served first at the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca and then, from 1843, in Hong Kong, where he spent three decades as missionary, educator, and scholar. Convinced that a missionary to China had first to understand the texts the Chinese themselves revered, he undertook the systematic translation of the Confucian canon — a project that occupied the rest of his life. In 1876 he became the first Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford, a chair he held until his death.

Legge's monument is The Chinese Classics (1861–1872), a bilingual edition presenting the original text, an English translation, and extensive scholarly notes. The first volume (1861) gathered the Analects, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean; the second, the Mencius. He went on to render the Classic of Documents (1865), the Classic of Poetry (1871), and finally the Spring and Autumn Annals together with its Zuo Commentary (1872). For much of the twentieth century these remained the standard complete English versions.

After settling at Oxford, Legge contributed several translations to Max Müller's series The Sacred Books of the East. These included the Classic of Changes (1882) and the Book of Rites (1885), as well as the principal Daoist scriptures. This later phase carried his work beyond the strictly Confucian canon into the wider religious literature of China.

Legge worked closely with Chinese scholars — above all the reformer Wang Tao — and grounded his translations in the orthodox commentarial tradition, leaning heavily on the readings of the Song master Zhu Xi. His prose, dense with annotation and now often judged archaic, has been superseded stylistically by later translators; yet its philological care and the accompanying Chinese text keep his editions in scholarly use to this day. By making the canon available to readers without Chinese, Legge effectively founded the English-language study of Confucius and his tradition.