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Wang Yong, Ōba Osamu, Joshua A. Fogel, Fan Wang, 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.22 If a shipment of eighty-six titles brought in forty-four crates to Nagasaki in 1711 is representative, and we think it is, most of the titles in the East Asian book trade were collections of or about literature, the Chinese classics (four were works on the Yijing or Classic of Changes), philosophy, and history. Other inventoried books included encyclopedias, genealogies, gazetteers, and works on calendrical science and medicine.23
Transformations of Texts and Traditions
As texts and ideas circulated in the Sinosphere, they often became transformed—the product of complex interactions between “borrowed” elements and the indigenous culture(s).24 Isabel Hofmeyr’s masterful book, The Portable Bunyan (2004), which discusses the transmissions, translations, and transmutations of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) in Europe, India, and especially Africa, provides an outstanding example of the creative ways that indigenous populations domesticated John Bunyan’s (1628–1688) text, illuminating important issues of colonialism and social class in the process.25
The most obvious factor influencing the spread and circulation of texts and ideas is, of course, language. As suggested, one reason the major premodern states of East Asia were able to borrow so freely from one another is that for hundreds if not thousands of years the elites in each culture employed the same basic written language—that is, literary Sinitic.26 This form of writing emerged in China more than three thousand years ago and underwent a number of transformations not only in its home environment27 but also and especially in other parts of the Sinosphere. Outside of China, the most common term for literary Sinitic was Han [i.e., “Chinese”] writing 漢文, pronounced Kanbun in Japan, Hanmun in Korea, and Hán văn in Vietnam. Regardless of how