Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

knowledge exchange. It focuses in particular on a Chinese genre of reference works known as wanbao quanshu 萬寶全書 (comprehensive compendia of myriad treasures). Japanese scholars have had an intense interest in late Ming editions of such works from the Edo period to the present, but they have shown far less interest in later developments in the genre. The reason can be found in a profound shift in the Sino-Japanese balance of knowledge and power in the Meiji and late Qing periods. This shift was manifest in a radically new Japanese orientation towards Western knowledge, which they appropriated into a new genre of “modern” encyclopedias known in Chinese as baike quanshu and in Japanese as hyakka zensho (百科全書; lit. “complete compendia of one hundred sciences”). This chapter highlights one particular wanbao quanshu supplement on botany that offers a potentially productive avenue for analyzing changing Sino-Japanese epistemic relations in the age of global science.

Taken together, the chapters that I have summarized all too briefly here raise as many questions as they answer. This is, after all, what pioneering research does. But the questions that our contributors have answered go a long way toward showing exactly how texts, ideas, and languages circulated within the Sinosphere and how they were transformed in complex ways, depending not only on the historical conditions under which they were transmitted but also on the specific political, social, and intellectual circumstances they encountered in the host environment. Perhaps the major conclusion that emerges from these careful studies is that although there was undeniably a shared culture in premodern East Asia—one that justifies treating the area as a coherent whole—this shared culture can only be seen clearly from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. Moreover, although many elements of this shared culture originated in the area we now refer to as China, these elements were seen by intellectuals in premodern East Asia as universal markers of civilization not necessarily particular to China.