The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage

by Norman J. Girardot

In this magisterial study, Norman J. Girardot focuses on James Legge (1815-1897), one of the most important nineteenth-century figures in the cultural exchange between China and the West. A translator-transformer of Chinese texts, Legge was a pioneering cross-cultural pilgrim within missionary circles in China and within the academic world of Oxford University. By tracing Legge's career and his close association with Max Müller (1823-1900), Girardot elegantly brings a biographically embodied approach to the intellectual history of two important aspects of the emergent "human sciences" at the end of the nineteenth sinology and comparative religions.

Girardot weaves a captivating narrative that illuminates the era in which Legge lived as well as the surroundings in which he worked. His encyclopedic knowledge of pertinent figures, documents, peculiar ideologies, and even the personal quirks of principal and minor players brings the world of imperial China and Victorian England very much to life. At the same time, Girardot gets at the roots of much of the twentieth-century discourse about the strange religious or nonreligious otherness of China.

Genres: China

861 pages, Hardcover

First published August 6, 2002

Reviews

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone raised within a Chinese cultural background, this book truly made me realize how easily Western perspectives—especially text-centered approaches—can be deceived by the false morality and elite narratives presented in Chinese texts. Once researchers detach themselves from the actual historical context—ignoring the zero-sum struggles embedded within the broader social structure of Chinese history, along with its famines and massacres—they become incapable of genuinely grasping the impotence and hollowness of the morality recorded by so-called Confucian elites within the bureaucratic system.

The coexistence of the distorted values and moral outlooks held by rulers who rarely, if ever, participated in textual production (the emperors), and by the ruled masses—the imperial subjects euphemistically referred to as “the common people”—alongside the paper morality proclaimed by the bureaucracy, is precisely what is subtly refracted in the characteristic phenomenon often found in Chinese texts that might be described as “one throat, two songs.”

In fact, the tendency of scholars to drift away from ordinary common sense, whether consciously or unconsciously, reveals a deeper problem within modern specialized humanities scholarship itself: unless one can claim to overturn or radically revise previous understandings, one’s expertise struggles to justify its own existence. This structural incentive, both openly and implicitly, pushes researchers toward forms of extremity and detachment from lived historical reality.

My criticism here applies not only to Legge and Müller, but equally to the author of this book, Norman Girardot.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I've read all year.