晚清來華新教傳教士向英、德的儒學傳播

Abstract

With China’s economic and political rise, it seems very likely that Chinese culture will participate in increasingly important ways within the dialogue of world civilization. At the crossroads of such a significant moment, it is helpful for us to review the spread of Confucian to the West. In the late Qing Dynasty, Christian missionaries came to China with Western invaders. Since previous studies focused mostly on the Western cultural invasion, there have greater study of how these Protestant missionaries went on to introduce Chinese culture to the West and promoted cultural exchanges upon their return to Europe are needed. This essay aims to help fill that gap by examining the introduction of Confucianism to the West during the late Qing Dynasty. Germany’s Richard Wilhelm, Britain’s James Legge and France’s Couvreur Seraphin are now sometimes called the three translation masters of Chinese texts. As the first Protestant in China, British Robert Morrison’s most important achievement was the compilation of “Chinese-English Dictionary,” which he completed himself after 16 strenuous years of work. Between 1861 to 1886， Scottish Protestant missionary James Legge translated and published “the Four Books” and “the Five Classics” into English, which marked the first time that such a task had been attempted since the beginning of the sixteenth century. During his thirty years in China, Legge would ultimately translate ten of the “Thirteen Classics”. In contrast to the majority of other missionaries and sinologists, German Protestant missionary Richard Wilhelm approached Confucianism through a multi-angled and holistic approach. Due largely to his precise and rigorous style of study, the great number of Confucian translations he produced, and his famous translation of the Yijing in particular, Wilhelm became known as a person with “incomparable translations”.