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The present issue of
Abstract
As the first school established by Protestant missionaries to China, the Anglo–Chinese College played an important role in the history of cultural communication between China and the West. The Anglo–Chinese College offered a broad tuition that included Christianity alongside Western and Chinese humanities and sciences, which promoted the development of modern education in China. Its printing press was the first to publish Chinese books by using metal moveable type, which modernized the publishing technology of China and opened the next phase of China’s print culture. Its translations between English and Chinese opened up China to Christian culture and Anglophone societies to Chinese classical culture. The Anglo–Chinese College built a bridge between the East and the West, not only in the time of Morrison and Legge, but in its legacy that continues to have an impact even until today.
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Single female missionaries arrived in Manchuria in 1882 and constituted more than half of the mission during the whole period of the mission activities there. This chapter shows the complexity of building the female missionaries’ view on China and their contribution to the creation of the Western image of China. First, the chapter shows how missionary candidates in Scotland were first given a vision of the Orient in the Women’s Missionary College through courses on non-Western cultures, initiated by Annie Hunter Small. Second, it discusses the further development of knowledge about China during a language course in Beijing. Such a language course not only facilitated the communication between missionaries and potential Christians, but it also opened different future career possibilities. Third, the chapter discusses how female missionaries presented an image of China to Scottish Presbyterians through missionary journals. Fourth, it presents the complexity of the relations female missionaries established on the mission field. Namely it discusses the friendship of a Scottish missionary Helen B. K. Maclean and a Chinese woman called Fragrant Tree. This was a very unusual friendship, as Fragrant Tree later moved to Scotland. All of these aspects present a variety of missionaries’ perceptions and knowledge of China, and their relations with Chinese women.
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This essay will explore the so-called “term question” associated with major attempts at providing a Chinese rendering of the name of God. It will focus on two foundational missionary-scholars to China, Matteo Ricci and James Legge, and examine the different philosophical and theological contexts that ultimately resulted in the same conclusion – that is, to identify an equivalence between the Christian God and the ancient Chinese understanding of Shangdi
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This chapter explores the understanding of the role of “the people” in James Legge’s (1815–1897) translation of the Book of Documents (1865). In comparison with other European translations of this book Legge’s readings will be explained in the context of both, the prevailing Chinese commentarial interpretations of his times as well as his own Scottish philosophical and theological background. The analysis attempts to tackle the question what exactly the factors were that inspired Legge’s readings, readings that have informed, and still continue to inform, contemporary interpretations of the Shangshu and thus contemporary discussions about Chinese traditional political culture and early Chinese approaches to human rights.
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This Afterword places James Legge in a tradition of contributions by Protestant missionaries or former missionaries to the development of sinology as a discipline in Britain. It takes note of his predecessor and teacher, Samuel Kidd, and offers a summary evaluation of Legge’s enduring scholarly achievement. It then discusses the sinological scholarship of the Methodist W. E. Soothill, the Anglican A. C. Moule, the Congregationalists G. S. Owen and W. H. Rees, the Baptist J. P. Bruce, and finally of Evangeline D. Edwards, a former Manchuria missionary of the United Free Church of Scotland who became professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The Afterword offers the conclusion that modern sinology remains indebted to the pioneering scholarship of James Legge and other leading figures in the brief period of Protestant missionary involvement in China.
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With a focus on The Great Learning (Daxue
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This paper will focus upon James Legge’s years as professor in Oxford and his ambivalent position there as both Scottish and non-conformist in a deeply Anglican university and city. At every level he was an outsider – and how does this impact upon the nature and future of Chinese studies but also the field of comparative religion. My sense is that not only was he a remarkable scholar, but in his conservative way he was also deeply ‘radical’ and his importance for the study of religion has barely been acknowledged.