Richard Wilhelm

Richard Wilhelm was born on 10 May 1873 in Stuttgart, in the German Empire. He trained as a Protestant theologian and was sent by a missionary society to the German controlled port city of Qingdao in China in 1899, where he remained for the better part of twenty five years, running a school and hospital and immersing himself in Chinese language and classical thought far more deeply than most of his missionary contemporaries. He came to admire Chinese civilization enough that his own later writing describes his work there as an attempt at genuine cultural exchange rather than one directional conversion.

In Qingdao he formed a close working relationship with the Chinese scholar Lao Naixuan, a former imperial official displaced by the 1911 revolution, who tutored him in the classical texts and traditional commentary. Together they began translating the I Ching in 1913, working steadily through the classic and its layered commentarial tradition until completing the translation in 1921; it was published in German in 1924. Wilhelm returned to Germany in the 1920s, became professor of Chinese studies at the University of Frankfurt, and founded and directed its China Institute until his death on 1 March 1930.

Wilhelm's German I Ching did more than any prior European rendering to present the text as a serious work of philosophy rather than a curiosity of divination, carrying into German both the core hexagram text and substantial portions of the Chinese commentarial tradition surrounding it. His approach favored fidelity to how Chinese scholars themselves had read the book across the centuries over any single simplified interpretation, a choice that shaped how the West would come to understand the text.

The German edition itself reached a comparatively narrow readership until Cary Baynes, a Jungian analyst's wife working at Carl Jung's suggestion, translated Wilhelm's German into English; Bollingen Foundation published her translation, with a foreword by Jung himself, in 1950. That English edition became the standard I Ching most Western readers have used ever since, carrying Wilhelm's scholarly framing, filtered twice through translation, to an audience far larger than his own German original ever reached in his lifetime. Wilhelm died five years after finishing his life's central project without seeing the scale its later reach would take.

Wilhelm's translation work extended well beyond the I Ching: he also produced German renderings of the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi and the Liezi, and, in his final years, worked with Carl Jung on The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929), a translation and joint commentary on a Chinese alchemical meditation text that paired Wilhelm's sinology with Jung's emerging psychological framework. That collaboration with Jung, continued afterward through Cary Baynes's English translations of both men's work, tied Wilhelm's sinology permanently to the psychological reading of Chinese texts that shaped their reception in the West for the rest of the twentieth century.