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Part of
Travel Writing and Cultural Transfer
Edited by Petra Broomans and Jeanette den Toonder
[FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures 20] 2024
► pp. 135–160

Chapter 6
“The East I Know”

Richard Wilhelm and The Soul of China

 | Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
This chapter analyses the forms of cultural transfer in Richard Wilhelm’s (1873–1930) China travel writings, brought together in The Soul of China (1925), with a specific focus on the transmission of the concept of “soul.” It examines the two-way transmission of this concept between the East and the West. In The Soul of China, Wilhelm created contact zones, which can be understood as a complex entanglement of different mind-sets at the beginning of the twentieth century after a series of social changes in both Germany and China. By means of The Soul of China, Wilhelm was determined to appeal to the influential analytical psychology in Europe and to illustrate the ancient spiritual laws of Chinese philosophy, primarily in response to the prevailing European esoteric movement, as well as to the abandonment of Confucianism in China. Wilhelm’s earlier translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower demonstrated that, in parallel with the soul of the West, there was also a soul of China, which could be understood as consisting of consciousness and unconsciousness. However, part of the soul of China, that element which was shaped by the ancient spiritual laws as found in Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, had not yet been discovered or appropriated by the West. Ultimately, the exchange of the concept of soul was mediated by the construal of a traveller-narrator in the contact zones which Wilhelm created in The Soul of China.
Keywords: Richard Wilhelm, the soul of China, The Secret of the Golden Flower, I Ching, Cultural Transfer, travelogue, The Soul of China
Article outline
  • Richard Wilhelm: Cultural transmitter between the East and the West
  • Chinese philosophy
    • The Secret of the Golden Flower
    • The I Ching
    • Contact zones: Cultural contact between China and Germany/Europe
    • Contact zones: Esotericism and Confucianism
    • Sino-European cultural contact
  • The soul of China
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/fillm.20.06yua
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