Legge, JAMES

Legge, JAMES, an eminent Chinese scholar, was born at Huntly in Aberdeenshire in 1815, and was educated at King's College, Aberdeen, where he graduated in 1835. He passed afterwards to High-bury Theological College, London, and went out to Malacca, arriving in December 1839, as a missionary to the Chinese in connection with the London Missionary Society. For some time he took charge of Dr R. Morrison's Anglo-Chinese college there; next laboured for thirty years at Hong-kong; and was appointed in 1876 to the newly-founded chair of the Chinese Language and Literature at Oxford with a Corpus Christi fellowship. His greatest works have been his editions of Chinese Classics and books about Confucius and Mencius (1862-93). The Confucian texts and Taoist texts form six vols. in the Sacred Books of the East. A Life of Confucius, the works of Mencius, and the She-King are separate publications. He published also a series of lectures on The Religions of China (1880), and wrote many important articles on Chinese matters, including the articles on China, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Mencius, the Taiping, &c. in this work. He received the degree of D.D. from New York (1841), and of LL.D. from Aberdeen (1870) and Edinburgh (1884). Of the Chinese Classics (arranged in 7 vols.), a second ed. of vol. i. appeared in 1893. He died 29th November 1897.