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It is also important to remember that conditions in China also changed over time, sometimes radically, altering perceptions at any given historical moment. After the “barbarian” Manchus conquered China in 1644, for example, many East Asian elites felt that the “Middle Kingdom” had lost some if not most of its cultural allure.45 Thinkers such as Yamaga Sokō 山鹿素行 (1622–1685), a Japanese Confucian and strategist, argued, for example, that Japan had surpassed China in geography, political morality, religion, literacy, and military arts, and, thus, only Japan deserved to be called Chūgoku 中國 (i.e., the “Middle Kingdom”).46 By the Qianlong era (1736–1795) this perception had changed somewhat, but “nativist” scholars throughout the Sinosphere were increasingly inclined to believe that their countries, rather than China, were the inheritors of true “civilization.”47
Another factor that should be kept in mind in examining the premodern history of writing in the Sinosphere, especially from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, is the availability of documents. As in all areas of the world throughout recorded history, many documents produced in the Sinosphere have been lost and never found. To be sure, under some circumstances, works that originated in one country might disappear there only to be discovered and “repatriated” elsewhere. For instance, in the sixth century CE, a Chinese scholar named Huang Kan 皇侃 (488–545) produced an extremely valuable work titled Lunyu yishu 論語義疏 (Commentary on the Analects), which disappeared in China for several centuries before resurfacing in various forms during sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan. In the mid-eighteenth century, a Japanese scholar named Nemoto Sonshi 根本遜志 (1699–1764) produced an emended edition of Huang’s work that found its way back to China around 1770, much to the delight of Qing-dynasty scholars.48
But far more often, lost documents remained lost. This seems to have been a particular problem in Vietnam, where great numbers of Vietnamese books disappeared during centuries of warfare, destroyed during the Ming dynasty’s infamous book-burning in the early fifteenth century, and,