Abstract: Weilai, commonly rendered as the equivalent of “future” in English, was once a marginalized concept in traditional Chinese culture. It developed into a dominant temporal category during the Late Qing period, when cultural encounters between China and the West gave rise to new ways of thinking about time. This paper argues that the modern meaning of weilai can be traced to a restructuring of knowledge and, more crucially, to translation as a key mechanism of cross-cultural interaction. Drawing on methods from translation history and conceptual history, the study unpacks the cultural heterogeneity of weilai and maps its trajectory into the intellectual discourse of Chinese thought. It shows that the modern conceptualization of weilai in China emerged through several waves of transformation: Weilai first appeared as a verbal structure in classical Chinese, with wei functioning as a negating element and lai meaning “to come”. It was then embedded in Buddhist karmic discourse before being connected to the concept of “future” in fin-de-siècle China through layered mediation, including the influence of Japanese translation practices. Through this translingual process of conceptual reconstruction, weilai has shifted from a mere temporal designation to a discursive resource for articulating futurity, enabling pioneering modes of imagination and expression in China’s pursuit of modernity.