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in more recent times, stolen or eradicated by politically inspired “anti-superstition” campaigns. The Ming book-burning effort was particularly devastating because its draconian goal was to destroy all written and printed materials that promoted Vietnamese rites and customs.49
Debates, Disagreements, and Prospects for Future Research
An important feature of this book is that it embraces rather than resists controversies and debates. Scholarly disagreements, we believe, are not only natural but also useful in revealing different points of view and cultural nuances that might be lost in more general discussions. As readers will quickly see, many disagreements revolve around issues of terminology. There is no agreement, for example, on the question of how to refer to the geographical area under discussion. We have chosen Sinosphere for the main title of this book, but some of our authors use other terms, including East Asia, the “Sinographic cosmopolis,” “Republic of Letters” (文藝共和國, 文人共和國, 知識共和國), and so on.
Even the names of individual countries pose terminological difficulties. In the first place, as indicated (in note 2 to this introduction), the boundaries of the five main culture areas in the Sinosphere shifted sometimes dramatically over time, with corresponding changes in the ways that rulers and elites referred to the lands under their dominion. Usually, the residents of a given culture area identified more with a regime (i.e., a dynasty, a ruler, or a kingdom) or a locality than with a “state” in the modern sense. As a result, some participants have chosen to use dynastic names, reign names, or the names of localities in referring to cultural groups, instead of conventional English names such as China, Korea, Japan, the Ryūkyū Kingdom, and Vietnam. Another terminological problem involves competing political claims to a territory. For instance, the Chinese characters for the Ryūkyū Kingdom, which the Qing dynasty considered to be a tributary state of China, were pronounced Liuqiu in the official dialect of the Qing dynasty. For the purposes of this introduction,