Striving for the 'Whole Duty of Man': James Legge and the Scottish Protestant Encounter with China: Assessing Confluences in Scottish Nonconformism, Chinese Missionary Scholarship, Victorian Sinology, and Chinese Protestantism (review)

Those who will find this two-volume publication useful include scholars and general readers interested in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and its position as a base for Western interactions with the Chinese Mainland, in the encounter between the West and China (particularly in the nineteenth century), in the lives and work of Christian missionaries and Chinese converts, and in questions about translation from one language to another (particularly from Chinese to English). More specifically, those with an interest in the important figure of James Legge (1815-1897)—successively missionary-teacher, missionary-scholar, pastor-scholar, and academic sinologist (at the age of sixty, Legge became the first Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford, England)—will find much to ponder, many ideas to respond to, and many leads for further research of their own.

Dr. Lauren Pfister has researched many details about Legge's family, background, education, friends, and associates (on both sides of the world); about Legge's literary work, particularly on the Chinese Classics; and Legge's methods of work. Of particular interest are the results of Pfister's analysis both of Legge's sermons and of Legge's large body of annotated translations from the Chinese, presented as insights into Legge's thoughts and feelings. The discussion of Legge's likely and known exposure to contemporary Scottish philosophy and the influence this had on Legge's views and outlook is similarly well conceived, as is Pfister's thoughtful analysis of the influence on Legge of his father, brothers, and father-in-law. As for Legge's close association with individual members of the Taiping movement (which was for a considerable period of time in rebellion against the Imperial Chinese leadership), what Pfister adds to what others have written on this topic is most interesting. Several other clusters of information in this book will also please and delight enthusiastic researchers who are deeply engaged in many other areas.

In organizing and presenting his research material in these two volumes, Pfister has sought to acknowledge and respond to some elements of academic and critical thought that have taken or legitimately could take James Legge as a subject of comment. In particular, he considers Legge from the powerful but still controversial perspective provided by Edward Said, who has named a certain type of response to people that the viewer finds "different" as "Orientalist," a term Said presents as a negative one. Pfister has also considered the responses to James Legge's work found today in mainland China or among Chinese scholars elsewhere, and he properly points out the sometimes inadequate bases on which these responses are built (mentioning, e.g., the loss of relevant nineteenth-century materials as a result of twentieth-century disturbances).

Pfister explains his method as follows. "First, I sought to write more narrowly defined and technical articles dealing with special problems. . . . Since 1988, more than twenty articles of this sort have been published. . . . In the meantime, and consequently with less consistency due to needs for [sic] further research and later revisions, the manuscript was gradually brought into its present form" (1:198 n. 9). Undoubtedly, the main text of a published biography that acknowledges the general reader (1:xxvi) is not the place for "narrowly defined and technical articles dealing with special problems," but sometimes the reader may wish that more of the material found in...