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Preface
The collective goal of this study, a collaborative effort involving scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America, is to examine carefully and critically the premodern cultural interactions that took place in the broad geopolitical area of East Asia known as the Sinosphere (China, Japan, Korea, the Ryūkyū/Liuqiu Kingdom, and Vietnam). As is well known, these culture groups shared a great many political and social values, religious beliefs, and artistic and literary traditions. One important reason was that these values, beliefs, and traditions were recorded and transmitted in the same basic written language—classical or literary Chinese, also termed “literary Sinitic.” This shared tradition of writing and culture justifies treating East Asia as a coherent whole.
Unfortunately, however, past studies of documents written in literary Sinitic have generally adopted a China-centered approach, treating the four other culture areas of East Asia as lesser versions of China, downplaying the unique histories of these countries, and ignoring the diverse and manifold cultural consequences of their individual use of literary Sinitic. Moreover, after the abandonment of classical Chinese by all four countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Sinosphere became what has been described as “a cultural realm in