Legge served as a representative of the London Missionary Society in Malacca and Hong Kong (1840–1873) and was the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford University (1876–1897).

In association with Max Müller he prepared the monumental Sacred Books of the East series, published in 50 volumes between 1879 and 1891.

In 1867, Legge returned to Dollar in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, where he invited Wang Tao to join him, and received his LLD from the University of Aberdeen in 1870.

He visited the Great Wall, Ming Tombs and the Temple of Heaven, where he felt compelled to take off his shoes with holy awe.

He left Peking, accompanied by Joseph Edkins, and headed for Shandong by mule cart to visit Jinan, Taishan, where they ascended the sacred Mount Tai, carried by four men on chairs.

As a Scottish nonconformist in the deeply Anglican university and city of Oxford, Legge was often treated as an outsider until his death.

[10] According to an anonymous contemporary obituary in the Pall Mall Gazette, Legge was in his study every morning at three o'clock, winter and summer, having retired to bed at ten.

[11] In 1879, Legge was a member of a committee formed to create a women's college at Oxford "in which no distinction will be made between students on the ground of their belonging to different religious denominations".

The remains of his second wife Hannah, who died before him in 1881, were exhumed from Saint Sepulchre's cemetery and placed beside the body of her husband in Wolvercote.

[14] Most of his most important manuscripts and letters are archived at the School of Oriental and African Studies and, secondly, in the Bodleian Library.

He believed that using a term already deeply entrenched in Chinese culture could prevent Christianity from being seen as a completely foreign religion.

[17] Legge's most enduring work has been The Chinese Classics: with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes, 5 vols., (Hong Kong: Legge; London: Trubner, 1861–1872): These contain parallel Chinese and English text, with detailed notes, introductions and indexes.