James Legge was born on 20 December 1815 in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Trained for the Congregationalist ministry, he was sent out by the London Missionary Society in 1839, working first at its Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca and then, from 1843, at the college's relocated site in the new British colony of Hong Kong, where he served as principal for many years.
His missionary duties gave him direct, sustained exposure to classical Chinese literature and to the scholars who could read it with him, and he leaned on Chinese collaborators throughout his working life, most substantially the reformer and scholar Wang Tao, who assisted him for years in Hong Kong and later in Scotland while Legge prepared his translations. In 1873 Legge returned to Britain, and in 1876 the newly created chair of Chinese at Oxford was given to him, the first such professorship in Britain. He held it until his death on 29 November 1897, having spent the last two decades of his life consolidating a body of translation that outlasted him by a century. His scholarship rested on an unusual working method for its time: rather than translating alone from a dictionary, he read each classical text through with Chinese teachers and collaborators, producing versions checked against native scholarly interpretation rather than against European sinology alone, a method that shaped both the reliability and the particular voice of his English translations.