‘THE GREATEST SINGLE ACHIEVEMENT OF WESTERN SINOLOGICAL SCHOLARSHIP DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY'
LEGGE, James.
The Chinese Classics: with a translation, critical and exegetical notes, prolegomena, and copious indexes … In seven volumes …
Hong Kong, at the author’s; London, Trübner & Co., 1861 [– 1865].
Three vols in four, large 8vo, I: pp. xiv, 135, [1], 376, II: pp. viii, 126, [2], 497, [1 (blank)], III.1: pp. xii, 208, 279, [1 (blank)], with double-page map of the nine provinces of Yu hand-coloured in outline, III.2: pp. [5], 282-735, [1 (blank)] (pp. 481-488 bound out of order); text in English and Chinese; small wormhole at foot of first few leaves of vol. I, small hole to last leaf of vol. III.1 (touching a few letters), small puncture holes to vol. III.2 pp. 703-735 (touching some words), somewhat browned, especially the first and last pages of each volume; in nineteenth-century red roan-backed boards with marbled sides, spines lettered and numbered in gilt, yellow marbled endpapers; some losses and red rot to spines, spines of vols I and III.1 partly detached, some splitting to joints and hinges; ink inscription of ‘Cyrus H. Peake Columbia University’ to front flyleaves of vols III.1 and 2, some twentieth-century underlining and marginalia in pencil and ink.
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The Chinese Classics: with a translation, critical and exegetical notes, prolegomena, and copious indexes … In seven volumes …
First editions of the first four volumes of Legge’s monumental Chinese Classics, with parallel Chinese and English texts, detailed introductions, notes, and indexes.
The Scottish sinologist and missionary James Legge (1815–1897) served as the first Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford. ‘His greatest and most lasting contribution to transcultural understanding was his massive translation Chinese Classics (first edn, 7 vols., 1861–72; second edn, 5 vols., partially ‘revised’, 1893–5). This bravely conceived and meticulously executed work was the greatest single achievement of Western Sinological scholarship during the nineteenth century and, though dated in style, remained the standard English version of these texts even in the late twentieth century’ (ODNB).
The first volume contains a biography of Confucius and the texts of the Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean; the second comprises the works of the Confucian philosopher Mencius; and the two-part third volume supplies the text of the Shujing or Book of Documents, a foundational text of Chinese political philosophy. Legge added further volumes to the series in 1871 and 1872.
