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acknowledged “China” as the source of important cultural influences, not the least of which was writing.3 For these reasons, we have employed the term “Sinosphere” (東亞文化圈) in the main title of this book to denote a “cultural sphere of Chinese written characters” (漢字文化圈)—a realm in which scholars who did not speak the same languages could nonetheless clearly communicate through the medium of “brush conversations” (筆談 or 筆話).4
Similarly, we have used the term “literary Sinitic,” to describe this script, which originated in classical China and is generally known in Chinese as wenyan wen 文言文 (“refined written words”).5 These two technical terms preserve a sense of early Chinese cultural influences, but they are not intended to privilege China or Chinese culture in any way.6 Rather, they should be viewed simply as place-holders for our wide-ranging, and often highly contested, conversations about language, philosophy, art, and literature.
The primary focus of this book, as with our other edited volume, Rethinking the Sinosphere: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Identity Formation in East Asia (Cambria Press, 2020), is on the ways that texts, images, ideas, and cultural practices circulated within and especially moved beyond local, regional, and “national” boundaries in the Sinosphere during the period from the tenth to the twentieth centuries, in particular, the early 1600s to the early 1900s.7 There are various names for these processes, including “transnationalism” and “globalization.”8 As texts, ideas, and cultural practices traveled over time and across space, they were assimilated or “domesticated” (a process often requiring some sort of theoretical and/or practical justification), transformed, and often recirculated.
Mechanisms of Cultural Transmission
As in other parts of the world, the mechanisms of cultural transmission in East Asia ranged from conquest and evangelism to trade and diplomacy. In the early history of the Sinosphere, beginning with the Qin (221–206 BCE)