James Legge

James Legge (1815–1897) was a Scottish missionary and sinologist, the first professor of Chinese at Oxford. Born in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, he went out for the London Missionary Society in 1839 and spent more than thirty years in Malacca and Hong Kong, where he ran the Anglo-Chinese College and began the translation of the Confucian canon that occupied the rest of his life. The Chinese Classics, with Chinese text, translation and notes, appeared from 1861, and his renderings of the Confucian and Taoist scriptures for Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East followed after his appointment to Oxford in 1876. His versions remained the standard English texts for a century.