Richard Wilhelm

Early life and coming to China

Richard Wilhelm was born on 10 May 1873 in Stuttgart, Germany. He grew up in a devout Protestant environment, received theological training and was ordained a pastor. In 1899 he was sent by the General Evangelical Protestant Missionary Society (also known as the Weimar Mission) across the ocean to Qingdao, then a German leased territory, and from then on his life was bound up with China.

Founding a school in Qingdao

On arriving in Qingdao, Wilhelm concluded that rather than pressing questions of faith straight away, he should first stoop to understand the culture and the people of this land. Around 1901 he founded the Lixian School (礼贤书院) in Qingdao, promoting an education that gave equal weight to Chinese and Western learning and taught both the new learning and the Chinese classics and histories. His approach to mission was gentle and centred on culture; he won the respect of the local gentry, and the Qing court also rewarded his work in education with an official rank.

Translating the classics

In Qingdao Wilhelm made many friends among Chinese scholars. He studied the I Ching under the late-Qing scholar Lao Naixuan (劳乃宣) and discussed ideas with Gu Hongming (辜鸿铭) and others, and his command of Chinese and his grasp of Chinese thought grew steadily deeper. He devoted his life to bringing the Chinese classics into the German-speaking world: the Analects (1910), the Daodejing (1911), the Zhuangzi (1912) and the Mencius (1914) appeared one after another. In 1924 his German translation of the I Ching, the fruit of many years' work, was published and came to be widely regarded as one of the finest translations in the West. The book deeply moved the psychologist Carl Jung, who later wrote the foreword to its 1950 English translation by Cary F. Baynes and saw it as a bridge to understanding Eastern wisdom.

Return to Germany and the China Institute

During the First World War Wilhelm remained in Qingdao, carrying on his teaching and translating. In the summer of 1920 he ended some twenty years in China and returned to Germany. He then taught at the University of Frankfurt, and in 1925 he founded the China Institute (China-Institut), devoted to introducing Chinese culture to Europe and training younger scholars. He died in Tübingen on 1 March 1930, aged only 56.

A cultural bridge

In his later years Wilhelm preferred to see himself as a cultural bridge and seldom stressed his identity as a missionary. Some studies note that in China he hardly ever measured his work by the number of converts, yet through his translations he let the wisdom of Laozi, Zhuangzi, Confucius and Mencius take root in the West. He gave his life to mutual understanding between two civilizations and is still remembered as a sincere envoy between China and the West.