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ruins,” the abandoned site of a once-shared, robust culture replaced by modern nation-states with nationalistic preoccupations and their own individual systems of writing based on vernacular speech.
From our standpoint, it was imperative to recover and reexamine the “classical” cultures of the premodern Sinosphere—not, of course, to bleach them of their individual distinctiveness and significance but to locate them once again in a wider world of discourse. As such, this study brings together scholars from different backgrounds, working on different cultures within the Sinosphere, into a direct and sustained conversation.
One of the most important goals of this study was to break down the longstanding dichotomies that have been established in prior scholarship between center and margins, self and “other,” empire and tributary states, “civilization” and “barbarism,” and so on. Instead, we made a conscious effort to view each culture and each state as conceptually equivalent, thus avoiding the prejudices so often imposed by a single perspective, especially one influenced by the dictates of modern nationalism. When seen in this way, documents written in literary Sinitic can no longer be considered simply as extensions or versions of Chinese culture; rather, they become—as, in fact, they always were—the products of a complex, sophisticated, and continuous process of cultural interaction, exchange, and transformation. The term Sinosphere, then, refers only to the broad geographical area in which literary Sinitic dominated elite written discourse; it does not privilege China in any way.
In several respects, this study is the first of its sort not only in terms of its explicitly transnational and comparative focus on the entire Sinosphere but also in terms of its extraordinarily international representation—the contributors are from East Asia (China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore), Europe, Canada, and the United States. Naturally, the use of several spoken languages—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and English presented challenges to our team of professional and volunteer interpreters—but they performed admirably under the difficult circumstances. Most of the contributors from North America