Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

These things were all simply tokens of “civilization,” which knew no fixed borders in either time or space even within China itself. Shun and King Wen had originally come from “barbarian” lands, and ethnically Han “Chinese” could be, and were on occasion, considered “barbarians.” Moreover, under the specific historical circumstances of the Manchu conquest, there was a sense in which Lý could, and did, consider his culture as superior to that of the Qing dynasty, where, after all, the officials who hosted him were individuals who had shaved their heads in the Manchu fashion and who no longer wore robes in the Song and Ming style.⁷⁷

Here, in sum, we see the limits of the simplistic and outworn idea of “Sinicization” (漢化)—that is, the adoption of Chinese culture by non-Chinese. The Vietnamese were not “Sinicized”; they were simply “civilized,” and they had done the civilizing in their own distinctive way. The same was true for the Japanese and the Koreans.