Shanghai enters the translator’s account not as a setting for a single continuous episode, but as a practical center of publication and scholarly exchange around the Yijing. A translation issued there in 1876 and a volume received from there in 1880 mark contrasting interventions in the interpretation of the classic; the city also belongs to the wider missionary debate over the English rendering of Chinese religious terms.

Publication and Translation

In 1876, Canon McClatchie published in Shanghai a translation titled A Translation of the Confucian Yî King, or the “Classic of Changes,” with Notes and Appendix. It included both the Text and the Appendixes, with several Appendixes interspersed through the Text as in ordinary school editions. The translator disputed McClatchie’s understanding of how the work was composed: in his view, the first and second Appendixes were by a later writer, not by King Wen and the Duke of Zhou. McClatchie’s stated aim was to disclose the Yijing’s mysteries through comparative mythology, an approach the translator considered unnecessary and unpersuasive. Though he followed the book paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence, he found nothing he could use to advantage in his own version.

Shanghai appears again in the translator’s account of P. Angelo Zottoli’s scholarship. After the translator’s own version had been completed—and the Text printed—he received from Shanghai the third volume of Zottoli’s Cursus Litteraturae Sinicae, published in 1880. Its treatment of the Yijing was selective: it translated the Text of the first two hexagrams and related material, addressed six other hexagrams in part, summarized the remaining fifty-six briefly, and printed Appendixes III, V, VI, and VII at length. The translator judged Zottoli’s Latin a considerable improvement on the earlier version by Philippe Grégoire Regis and his collaborators, while noting that it arrived too late to inform his completed work.

Scholarly and Missionary Networks

The city’s significance extends beyond the publication of books. The translator identifies McClatchie as a clergyman of Shanghai, situating the 1876 version within the foreign missionary scholarship of the period. He also recounts a controversy over translating Di and Shang Di: in June 1880, twenty-three men, including missionaries in China, protested to Professor F. Max Müller that the translator should not render the terms as “God” and “Supreme God.” The dispute was aired publicly when Müller printed the letter and his reply in The Times on December 30, 1880. The translator defended his choice as a considered rendering rather than a private interpretation, and observed that most Protestant missionaries in China used Di and Shang Di as the nearest analogue for God.

Books, Readers, and the City

Shanghai also figures in the material conditions of scholarship. The translator’s account says that he received Zottoli’s volume from the city after his own translation was already complete; it thus serves as a point of arrival for a work that could be assessed but not incorporated into the finished translation. Elsewhere, the translator describes a second-hand copy of Daily Lectures on the Yî purchased for him in Canton, whose previous owner’s punctuation, interlineations, and marginal notes helped him follow a Chinese reader’s efforts to interpret difficult passages. Set beside that annotated book and the imperial edition first published in 1715, the Shanghai publications represent one strand in a much larger chain of textual transmission: editions and interpretations circulated among readers, while disagreements over authorship, arrangement, and religious vocabulary shaped what the classic could mean to foreign audiences.