though antiquities would not yet be the focus of academic interest. Abel-
Re ́musat was succeeded by Stanislas Julien (1797–1873), who published on
Chinese ancient industries (1869) among other subjects.
As with Re ́musat, the main interest of Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1783–1835),
theWrst Professor of East Asian studies at Bonn in 1816, was philology. The
beneWt for Bonn, however, seems to have been little, given that he was allowed to
stay in Paris on the grounds of the lack of resources for his studies in Bonn.
Following Humboldt’s tradition, he also had an interest in geography and
cartography. Nevertheless, he apparently paid more attention to Egyptian hiero-
glyphs than to Asian antiquities, arguing with Champollion on the subject
(Walravens 1999). Nor was the Briton James Legge (1815–97) interested in
antiquities. Legge was a Scottish Congregationalist who in 1839 had been
appointed by the London Missionary Society to China. As the country was
still closed to Europeans, he remained at Malacca for three years before moving
to Hong Kong, where he lived for thirty years. Legge learned Chinese and started
to translate the Chinese classics in 1841 in order to help missionaries to
understand Chinese culture. Several gentlemen involved in trade with China
suggested that the University of Oxford create a chair of Chinese Language and
Literature and proposed that Legge should be oVered it. In 1876 he was
appointed Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford, and held this
position until his death. In addition to his work as a translator, Legge would
take Sinology into theWeld of Comparative Religions, with his comparative
research on Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity, and into an-
thropology through his relationship with the German Professor of Sanskrit at
Oxford, Max Mu ̈ller (1823–1900).
Despite the disinterest towards antiquities shown by Re ́musat, Klaproth,
and Legge, it was the thread of philology that led scholars to them, something
that, as we have seen, did not happen in Latin America, but had occurred in
the classical and biblical lands. In the case of China and Japan, however, their
relative isolation meant that it was only possible for this interest to develop
from the 1860s. The scholastic connection between the philologists and the
explorers would be through the French philologist Edouard Chavannes
(1865–1918). He was theWrst European to study Chinese funerary and
Buddhist monuments. Chavannes had been trained in the Parisian College de France and lived in China from 1889, working at the French Legation in Beijing. He undertook hisWrst exploration in 1893, when he visited various archaeological sites in Northern and Central China. In the same year he was appointed professor at the College de France. His early years in the post were
occupied with philology. In 1905, however, he gave up what he described as
‘this interminable business’ referring to the translation he was involved in,
and turned his interest towards Chinese epigraphy. Accompanied by the
Latin America, China, and Japan 191