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making generalizations based on such identifications suspect. Other historical designations are similarly problematic. What do we mean when we refer to periods as “premodern,” “early modern,” or “modern”? There is clearly no scholarly agreement on such terms.53
One major geographical question that periodically arises in discussions of the Sinosphere is whether this designation should apply only to areas that Westerners identify today as China, Korea, Japan, the Ryūkyū islands, and Vietnam. Certainly, there were other Asian civilizations in the general region that were influenced by literary Sinitic at one time or another.54 The kingdom known in Chinese as Bohai 渤海 (698–926 CE), for instance, was independent of China but had a Sinographically based examination system similar to that of the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE).
And what about other culture groups in the Sinospheric orbit? The Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans, and Tangut peoples to the north and west of China, for example, translated Buddhist and other texts from literary Sinitic into their own non-Sinitic written scripts almost as soon as they were exposed to them, whereas literate Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese had direct and immediate access to all books and tracts written in literary Sinitic, making translation less necessary. Some of our authors with interests in Central and/or West Asia have suggested that we extend our vision westward from East Asia. But how far west might we go? For many decades Jesuit missionaries in China and Vietnam, and for shorter periods in Japan and Korea, learned literary Sinitic and then rendered it into their own written scripts (mainly Latin, French, and Italian) for consumption by Europeans. How did this process compare with similar translation and transmission processes in East, Central, and Western Asia?
Finally, although several of our authors have done an excellent job in addressing cross-cultural issues of gender and class, much more remains to be done in both of these areas. Most of our chapters focus on men and elites, and we have said very little about religious interactions, which also involve questions of gender and class.55 And although we have some