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I Ching Oracle Guide The missionary who baptized no one, and the I Ching the West received

The missionary who baptized no one, and the I Ching the West received

Western readers meet the I Ching as a German book, often in an English dress. Chinese accounts of the same life start further east: a missionary in Qingdao who baptized no one, a school, and a Qing scholar who made every German sentence prove itself in Chinese.

Richard Wilhelm was born on 10 May 1873 in Stuttgart and died on 1 March 1930 in Tübingen, aged 56. In May 1899 the Allgemeiner Evangelisch-Protestantischer Missionsverein, the German General Protestant Missionary Society, sent him to Qingdao (青岛), then a newly leased German territory. He spent 22 years there, with an interruption. He took the Chinese name 卫礼贤 (Wèi Lǐxián). According to the Qingdao site Daily QD, he first used 尉礼贤 and changed the opening character after mediating a conflict in Gaomi (高密) in 1899, because 尉, officer, sounded too military. That renaming is in one source; it has not been confirmed elsewhere.

A remark of his own keeps returning in Chinese articles. As a missionary in China he baptized not a single Chinese person; he himself became an adherent of Confucianism. In 2011 Chinanews ran the headline 不传教的传教士：卫礼贤在中国没给一个人施过洗, the missionary who did not missionize: Wei Lixian baptized no one in China. The 2019 piece 卫礼贤在青岛 (Wei Lixian in Qingdao) on the Chinese People's Political Consultative Network says the same. The story that he spent those 22 years converting Chinese people to Christianity is refuted by his own statement.

Qingdao and the 礼贤书院

In 1900 Wilhelm opened a school in his house on Jiaozhou Street, with a little over twenty pupils: the first school of a modern kind in Qingdao. Chinese Wikipedia records the first name as 德华神学校. In 1901 the school gained its own building beside the church; in 1903 it moved to new premises on Shanghai Street under the name 礼贤书院 (Lǐxián Shūyuàn). According to Daily QD the motto was 教無類、一視同仁, education without distinction, equal treatment for all, and the curriculum covered German, Chinese, science and commerce. In 1905, according to the same source, a girls' section was added; Wilhelm's wife taught there and worked against foot-binding.

The school later took the names 礼贤甲种商业学校 (1919), 私立礼贤中学 (1923), and after 1952 山东省青岛第九中学, Qingdao No. 9 Middle School. The school stood at Shanghai Road 7; that old site now holds Qingdao No. 37 Middle School and a Lixian school linked to Tongji University. The survey 卫礼贤与《易经》研究 (Wei Lixian and Yijing research) on sinologystudy.com records a school library that at one point held more than 30,000 volumes, for Wilhelm's own study and that of Chinese scholars he knew.

That points to a single practice, not a late hobby. The school, the library and the refusal to baptize belong together. He treated Chinese formation as a peer, not as a porch to the font.

Lao Naixuan and the back-translation

劳乃宣 (Láo Nǎixuān) was born on 14 November 1843 in Guangping, Zhili, and died on 21 July 1921. He was a late-Qing official and scholar who rose through the examination system, worked on phonetic-script reform, and from November 1911 to February 1912 served as rector of the institution that preceded Peking University. According to Daily QD, the former governor 周馥 (Zhou Fu) introduced Wilhelm to him. Together they founded the 尊孔文社 (Zunkong Wenshe, Society for the Veneration of Confucius), dated by sources around 1913-1914, after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911. Under Lao's guidance, according to Daily QD, Wilhelm began his thorough translation of the Yijing in 1913.

Chinese newspapers kept the division of labour with some care. 劳乃宣和卫礼贤青岛合译《易经》 (Lao Naixuan and Wei Lixian translate the Yijing together in Qingdao), in the Qingdao Zaobao and Qilu Wanbao, describes the loop as follows. Lao gave Wilhelm detailed oral commentary on the text. Wilhelm translated into German, then rendered his own German back into Chinese, and the two revised together until the meaning held. Wilhelm spent about eleven years on the work, circa 1913-1923/24.

Our reading: what the West calls the Wilhelm translation is, in that account, a two-handed text. The German sentence had to survive a Chinese check. Lao was not an informant at the side of the desk; he was the standard. That later readers see a German name and an English name on the spine follows from the publishing history, not from the work in Qingdao.

Lao died on 21 July 1921. The printed book is dated 1923/1924. Set those dates side by side and it looks as if the book was finished without the teacher; the sources do not say when the joint work ended.

Jena, Bollingen, Deventer

Wilhelm's German translation appeared as I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen, issued by Eugen Diederichs in Jena in two volumes (Book 1-2 and Book 3), dated 1923/1924. A Zhihu overview, 薪火相传，卫礼贤与劳乃宣合作翻译《易经》 (The flame is passed on), says that after 1924 the book found a wide echo, was reprinted more than twenty times, and was translated into English, Spanish, French and Italian, becoming the West's accepted authoritative Yijing. Those reprint figures stand in Chinese surveys; a separate Western confirmation of the exact count is missing.

Wilhelm did not make the English version himself. Cary F. Baynes produced it in 1950 for Bollingen/Pantheon, with a foreword by C.G. Jung and an introduction by Wilhelm's son Hellmut Wilhelm. A myth, which even appears in one Chinese overview, says that Jung translated the English I Ching. That is false. Jung wrote the foreword. He and Wilhelm were personal friends; Jung also wrote an introduction to Wilhelm's Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blüte (1929; English The Secret of the Golden Flower, 1931).

According to Dutch Wikipedia, the first printing of the Dutch translation, by A. Hochberg-van Wallinga from the German, appeared in 1953: a translation of a translation. Bookseller metadata also name the publisher L.J. Veen for that first printing; that is unconfirmed here. The twentieth printing came from Ankh-Hermes in Deventer in 2006. Later editions also came from Ankh-Hermes, including a 1991 printing and a revised edition on 4 October 2016, prepared with Albert Bodde and with introductory work by Harmen Mesker. According to the publisher, 99 percent of the book stayed the same. Printings between 1953 and 1991 cannot be pinned down.

A Dutch Wilhelm is therefore Lao's oral reading, Wilhelm's German, and Dutch that rests on that German. For anyone asking which I Ching translation the West in fact received, that layering is not a detail.

World literature after a war

According to one English-language discussion, Wilhelm did not offer a merely philological rendering. He gave the Yijing as late-imperial Confucian scholars still taught and practised it: a text of moral self-cultivation and cosmic attunement, not in the first place an ancient diviner's handbook. Wilhelm himself called the Yijing unquestionably one of the most important books in the world's literature, with a living stream of deep human wisdom. Jung praised his unclouded and far-sighted view of things and that miracle of empathy.

Back in Germany Wilhelm founded the China-Institut in Frankfurt and taught sinology. According to 卫礼贤在青岛 he received the honorific great Germanic sinologist, and in the 1920s, alongside the earlier Zunkong Wenshe, worked with 梁启超 (Liang Qichao) and 胡适 (Hu Shi) around a Confucian Culture Society. In 1993 the Ruhr University Bochum named its Richard-Wilhelm-Übersetzungszentrum after him.

According to Hon Tze-ki and Andreas Günter Weis in Monumenta Serica (2023), Wilhelm's long collaboration with the Baltic-German philosopher Hermann Keyserling (1880-1946) was crucial to his turn as translator-teacher. He came to see the Yijing as Weltliteratur: wisdom for people everywhere, including Germans living with the aftermath of the First World War.

Set Keyserling and the 1923/1924 dating beside Lao's year of death, and the printed book is seen to carry two contexts. Qingdao supplied a Confucian text checked by speech. Germany gave that text a task: wisdom for a defeated Germany. It is our reading that this is why the I Ging became the Western standard book. It answered a German need that had little to do with Shang oracle bones.

Sinologystudy.com calls Wilhelm's Yijing translation and research in Europe 堪称一流, of the first rank. That commemorative tone is silent about later philological critique. Our reading: that tone scores something else, namely whether he treated the Confucian Yijing as a peer.

Two yardsticks, one book

According to the same English-language discussion, later sinologists, armed with finds from the Shang and Zhou periods, point out that Wilhelm's text diverges considerably from the likely Bronze Age meaning of the Zhouyi. He reads into it a philosophical system added only later, through the Ten Wings. A recurring charge is theification. Tian (Heaven) and Qian (the Creative) were rendered with a reverence that suggests a single divine will, which critics trace to a Christian-monotheistic and German-idealist colouring of what had been a more shamanic, oracular whole.

Wilhelm's defenders reply that he did not set out to reconstruct an older, bare oracle book. He meant to pass on the text as the Confucian tradition had read and lived it for centuries. Whether literal philological accuracy is the right measure for that aim is itself in dispute. Some sinologists, especially later and archaeology-led, find him too philosophical and dated. Others still treat his version as the most approachable and influential gate to the Yijing for Western readers. Chinese sources are largely laudatory and usually omit that Western critique.

Our reading: the two camps are not sitting the same exam. Chinese remembrance asks whether Wilhelm took the Confucian Yijing seriously. Archaeological sinology asks whether he recovered the Bronze Age Zhouyi. He did the first. The second, his defenders say, he did not attempt. To mark him down on the second is to mark a different book from the one he made with Lao Naixuan.

The claim that Jung wrote the English translation is false. That it surfaces, even in one Chinese overview, points elsewhere. Our reading: for many readers Jung's name on the foreword outweighed Baynes's on the title page. It follows, we think, that the West received this I Ching not only as a Chinese classic, but as a book a European psychologist had signed.

Sources

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