James Legge and the Chinese Classics
James Legge and the Chinese Classics

Author: Marilyn Laura Bowman

Publisher: FriesenPress

Published: 2016-08-31

Total Pages: 969

ISBN-13: 146028884X

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James Legge (1815-1897), was a great Scots scholar and missionary famed as a translator of the Chinese Classics when struggles between Britain and China included two wars. It was an era of sailing ships, pirates, opium wars, the swashbuckling East India Company, cannibals eating missionaries, and the opening of Qing China to trade and ideas. Legge was vilified by fundamentalist missionaries who disagreed with his favourable views about Chinese culture and beliefs. He risked beheading twice while helping Chinese individuals being terrorized during the Taiping Rebellion. He became so ill from Hong Kong fevers when only 29 that he was forced to return to the UK to save his life. Recovering, he and his three talented Chinese students attracted such interest that they were invited to a private meeting with Queen Victoria. Legge thrived despite serious illnesses, lost five of his 11 children and both wives to premature deaths, survived cholera epidemics, typhoons, and massive fires. He was poisoned twice in a famous scandal, helped save a sailing ship from fire on the high seas, took in a bohemian Qing scholar on the run, foiled a bank-bombing plot, and earned enmity in the colony for providing court testimony about translation that favoured accused Chinese men rather than the colonial authorities. Legge’s resilient responses and incredible productivity reflected the passion he had developed at the age of 23 for understanding the culture of China. He retired to become a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and the first Professor of Chinese.

The New Middle Kingdom
The New Middle Kingdom

Author: Kendall A. Johnson

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2017-04-25

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1421422522

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Looking at the Far East and American ambition in China through the lens of literature. In the imaginations of early Americans, the Middle Kingdom was the wealthiest empire in the world. Its geographical distance did not deter commercial aspirations—rather, it inspired them. Starting in the late eighteenth century, merchants from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Salem, Newport, and elsewhere cast speculative lines to China. The resulting fortunes shaped the cultural foundation of the early republic and funded westward frontier expansion. In The New Middle Kingdom, Kendall A. Johnson argues that—for the merchant princes who speculated in the global Far East, as well as the missionaries and diplomats who followed them—Manifest Destiny spurred more than the coalescence of the fractious regions into the continental Far West. It also promised a golden gateway to the Pacific Ocean through which the nation would realize its historical destiny as the world’s new Middle Kingdom of commerce. Examining the influential accounts of westerners at the center of early US cultural development abroad, Johnson conceives a romance of free trade with China as a quest narrative of national accomplishment in a global marketplace. Drawing from a richly descriptive cross-cultural archive, the book presents key moments in early relations among the twenty-first century’s superpowers through memoirs, biographies, epistolary journals, magazines, book reviews, fiction and poetry by Melville, Twain, Whitman, and others, travel narratives, and treaties, as well as maps and engraved illustrations. Paying close attention to figurative language, generic forms, and the social dynamics of print cultural production and circulation, Johnson shows how authors, editors, and printers appealed to multiple overlapping audiences in China, in the United States, and throughout the world. Spanning a full century, from the post–Revolutionary War era to the Gilded Age, The New Middle Kingdom is a vivid look at the Far East through Western eyes, one that highlights the importance of China in antebellum US culture.