Richard Wilhelm: the Ultimate China Expat

Complain about China all you want: the blocked websites, the traffic, the way nothing is done to your standards. The more you rant, the more your subconscious Orients itself. Any China expat who’s been here a while knows the inveterate basher who goes home to his earthly paradise, only to return a year or so later. Home was too quiet, too boring, too predictable.

It’s a matter of soul, not logic or intellect. In fact, one of the smartest China hands to ever do an extended stint on the mainland, Richard Wilhelm, felt the dichotomy more deeply than most. In the end, the struggle between his native and new Chinese side may well have killed him. But not before he left the world a richer place for his sojourn in the Middle Kingdom.

If you find much to be desired in China’s service sector now, you should have seen the place when Wilhelm got here. The year was 1899. The place – Qingdao. Foreign respect for China was at an all time low, and the sons of heaven didn’t think much of us either, barbarians for all our flashy cameras and guns. Rather than seeking cross-cultural self-actualization, Wilhelm came on a mission, literally. He had left his native Germany to convert lost souls to the Protestant version of Christ’s message.

Shortly after his arrival, the Boxer Rebellion shocked the world, giving Euros in China a good reason to open up lines of real communication and understanding. Brainiac Wilhelm was already well on his way to mastery of Mandarin, making him much more valuable as a translator than as a saver of souls. Soon he was rendering German religious tracts in Chinese, and Qing government proclamations back into German. By 1905, he was working on full book translations, an avocation that continued to the day he died.

Deprived of conventional entertainments, cafes, and nightspots, and a natural intellectual besides, Wilhelm plunged into Chinese religious texts: Dao, Buddhist, and Confucian manuscripts by the reading-room full. After a few years both his wife and fellow missionaries remarked on how his personality had altered, how Chinese he seemed. Wilhelm credited his new perspective to his respect for the spiritual depths he had plumbed in his reading; his altered perspectives were merely symptomatic. As for his erstwhile mission, he would one day boast that in his two decades in China, he had never baptized a single Chinese. His transformation bestowed a vision he could truly commit to: building a bridge between Eastern and Western spirituality.

But as one may imagine, the road from rigorous Teutonic Protestant to proto- New Age spiritualist was a conflicted one. Wilhelm blames the struggle on his particularly nasty bout of amoebic dysentery, brought on by some putrid Qingdao street food in 1910. He lay sick in bed for months; his family feared for his life. Shortly after recovering to semi-mobility he met Lao Naisuan. A Daoist sage, Lao Naisuan helped Wilhelm regain his former vitality within weeks. Even more beneficently, he counseled Wilhelm through his spiritual torment and brought him to a new level of peace and understanding.

Lao Naisuan had Confucius in his family tree, and long training in Confucian government and traditions. But it was his proficiency in Dao methods, from Ba Guan to Qi Gong, that aided Wilhelm most. Finally, impressed with his foreign friend’s intellectual curiosity, sincerity, and increasingly Chinese outlook, Lao Naisuan inducted Wilhelm into the mysteries of the I Ching. This was the first recorded time that an eminent Chinese scholar had shared his country’s deepest spiritual traditions and insights with a European.

In 1913, the two began translating the I Ching from Chinese to German, a monumental task. This was no prolonged errand of finding the best word in a dictionary. Rather, it was a painstaking procedure demanding fine understanding and detailed discussion. The work was not finished until 1921. Lao Naisuan died just as the galleys were coming out. Wilhelm continued editing, adding footnotes to what he published as I Ching: Book of Changes in 1923. To this day, it is considered the definitive translation.

Called back to Germany in 1924, he became Professor of Chinese studies at the University of Frankfurt, and a year later founded the China Institute. His translation took back seat to an impassioned round of lecturing and teaching. Despite his deep knowledge, Wilhelm met mostly with indifference, and often contempt, for his message of an eastern spiritual tradition that was universally valid. The view of Christianity as the beginning and end prevailed, except in academia, where his missionary background earned him skepticism.

He eventually found a sympathetic ear in Count Keyserling, an adherent of Darmstadt’s radical School of Wisdom. It was at this progressive center for learning that Wilhelm gained enough of a following to earn his work some success. He got some more books published, and was soon hobnobbing with and influencing such German cultural heavies as Herman Hesse and Jospeh Hauer.

But his greatest friendship made at the School of Wisdom was with Carl Jung, who would later plunge into the world of I Ching to declare it “a synchronicity computer”. It is Jung who tells us in his writings that Wilhelm just couldn’t transition easily back into buttoned-down German life, his Chinese soul too strong within him. Jung theorizes that the divide weakened his friend physically, enough for the resurgence of amoebic dysentery that took his life in 1930. Only fifty seven, he left behind a definitive translation of the I Ching, the heart of Chinese mysticism. Most of us won’t die from going back home, but then again, most of us will never travel as far into China as Richard Wilhelm did.

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