Legge romanization is atranscription system for Mandarin Chinese, used by the prolific 19th-century sinologistJames Legge. It was replaced by theWade–Giles system, which itself has been largely supplanted byHanyu Pinyin. The Legge system is still to be found in Legge's widely available translation of theI Ching, and in some derivative works such asAleister Crowley's version of theI Ching. The transcription was initially devised byMax Müller for the publication of the multi-volumeSacred Books of the East.^[1]

Although frequently called a "transliteration", Legge's system is atranscription of Chinese, as there can be notransliteration of Chinese script into any phonetic script, like theLatin alphabet.^{[citation needed]}

Features of the Legge system include:

• the use of ⟨h⟩ to signal consonantalaspiration: e.g. pinyin ⟨pi⟩ or Wade–Giles ⟨p'i⟩ corresponds to ⟨phî⟩,
• the use of aFraktur letterz ⟨𝖟⟩^[2] distinct fromRoman ⟨z⟩, and
• the use of italicized consonants distinct from their normal forms.

Comparing words in the Legge system with the same words in Wade–Giles shows that there are often minor but non-systematic differences, which makes direct correlation of the systems difficult.

The system uses the following vowels andsemivowels:

a â ă e ê i î o u û ü w y

Vowel letters also occur in variousdigraphs, which include:

âi âo âu eh ei ih ui

Legge transcription uses the following consonants:

• Legge transcription of Yijing hexagram names — alongside their Wade–Giles and Pinyin forms

• Romanization of Chinese
• I Ching

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