Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

that studies of the Changes were not a major feature of Ryūkyūan intellectual life.²

There were many mechanisms by which people, texts, ideas, products, practices, and skills traveled across land and sea borders in premodern East Asia. In addition to China’s military occupation of northern Korea (from 107 BCE to 313 CE) and northern Vietnam (from 111 BCE to 938 CE), which brought classical Chinese writing (文言文) and many other cultural influences to these countries, there were a great many formal and informal missions sent from one country to another by land and sea—sometimes within the framework of a tributary relationship, sometimes in other guises, and always with an eye toward gaining and/or distributing products and/or information.³ Wang Yong 王勇, Ōba Osamu 大庭脩, and others have written insightfully about an East Asian “Book Route” 書籍之路 (more properly “Routes”), analogous to the idea of a “Silk Route” (again, more properly “Routes”) that facilitated the circulation and recirculation of texts and ideas.⁴

The classical Chinese language, also known as literary Sinitic,⁵ was extremely well suited for such transnational circulations not only because any text written in it could be easily read and appreciated by literate elites in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam but also because these elites, and literate commoners as well, could exchange ideas quite readily in personal encounters through the practice of brush-conversations (筆談 or 筆話), even when the parties involved did not speak the same language. The use of literary Sinitic in this way enabled envoys from various countries in East Asia to communicate easily and efficiently. Liam C. Kelley and William F. Pore provide a number of illuminating examples of “conversations” that took place in Beijing, involving intellectuals from three different cultural traditions—Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese.⁶ Conversations of this sort also involved Japanese scholars, of course.