This paper explores the transmutation of a famous Chinese artistic motif—the “Eight Views of Xiaoxiang” (“Xiaoxiang bajing” 瀟湘八景), which, as the title of the paintings suggests, refers to eight aspects of the beautiful Xiaoxiang landscape in what is now Hunan province. The paintings are accompanied by sets of poetic verses that explain and amplify the bucolic scenes. After its appearance in Northern Song China around the eleventh century, this graphic and literary motif traveled to Korea in the twelfth century and to Japan in the thirteenth. Later it also went to Vietnam and the Ryukyu Islands. This paper, based on a careful “reading” of both the eight scenes and the poetic inscriptions accompanying them, will trace the aesthetic and cultural evolution of this theme in the course of its travels.

From the beginning of their recorded history, Vietnamese wrote poetry in the language and prosodic forms current in the Sinosphere. The language was literary Chinese (Hán) and the forms were based on Han and Tang prosody. There is evidence that poetry was written in a vernacular Vietnamese script as early as the thirteenth century, but the earliest surviving Vietnamese-language poems, written in a demotic script that derived from Chinese characters (Nôm), date from the fifteenth century. What are considered to be distinctively Vietnamese poetic forms, the six-eight mode (lục bất) and a hybrid double-seven six-eight mode (song thất lục bất), began to appear in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This paper analyzes four such long poems attributed to three poets: Hoàng Sĩ Khải (c. 1520-c. 1610), Phùng Khắc Khoan (1528-1613), and Đào Duy Từ (1572-1634). These works are apparently the earliest to be written in the distinctive Vietnamese six-eight and double-seven six-eight genre, indeed in any non-Sinitic poetic style. The paper considers the contents of the poems to identify common themes and queries why this literary innovation occurred at that particular time.

This research examines the Pentasyllabic Poetry for Primary Learning (Ấu học ngũ ngôn thi 幼學五言詩) written in Sinographs and Nôm script in Vietnam as a case study of the textbooks in pre-20^th century primary education. This paper claims, based on Chinese-origined East Asian Sinological primary textbooks of the Progidy  Poetry (Shentong Shi 神童詩), the Initial Teaching Poetry for Primary Learning (Xunmeng Youxue Shi 訓蒙幼學詩) and the Poetry for the First Doctoral Candidate (Zhuangyuan Shi 狀元詩), a certain Vietnamese scholar reconstructed and rewritten these textbooks to become a new textbook of Vietnam with several newly-composed poems. The new textbook was translated from Literary Sinitic into Vietnamese in both prose and poetry, to adapt to the educational context of two languages (Chinese and Vietnamese) and two scripts (Sinographs and Nôm script) in Vietnam. These reconstruction and translation on one hand made Vietnamese primary education integrate with the Sinographic Cosmopolis in East Asia, on the other hand defined Vietnamese own characteristics via the localization of this textbook’s formation, language, and script.

Ashi Tozan芦東山 (1696–1776) is a particularly interesting figure because his lifework, the Mukeiroku 無刑録, so heavily influenced studies of Chinese criminal justice. Mukeiroku has been highly regarded as a groundbreaking achievement among the classics of Chinese criminal law, comparable even with modern Western criminal law studies. Yet, if we look at Tozan’s literary works as well as commentaries on the Chinese Neo-Confucianism Classis, the tendency of strong indigenous faith, the Tokugawa National Studies flourished in his age can be easily realized as his intellectual standpoint. This also reflected in the last chapter of Mukeiroku, but so far less well studied. It is well known that Neo-Confucianism in Japan experienced a long history of imitation, absorption, and transmission, and that it finally developed and formulized indigenous ideological theories generally known as Kokugaku 国学or National Studies—a term coined to distinguish it from Kangaku 漢学or “Chinese studies” through its interpretation and analysis of Confucian texts. This paper will shed light on the points of, while Ashi Tozan adumbrate the binary nature of pre-modern Japanese Neo-Confucian studies and by interpret the key concepts, how Tozan held an entirely different attitude toward Neo-Confucianism, to which he frequently paid the highest respect, especially when the texts were written in Chinese. By examine this issue, the purpose and intention of Mukeiroku will be also clarified. 

Ashi Tōzan (蘆東山 1699-1776) is a Confucianist who served at Sendai domain in the middle of the Edo period. One of his important works is Mukeiroku 無刑錄, consisting of eighteen scrolls. In this work, the author mainly argues that criminals should not be physically punished. Instead, moral education should be the preferred way to help the criminals get back to the right track. Although this work was compiled in late eighteenth century, the main idea seems preceding modern criminal laws. In fact, the core philosophy behind Tōzan’s idea can be traced back to Chinese traditional Confucianism. Particularly, the influence from Cheng and Zhu’s study of principle is obvious. Taking this opportunity of international conference on the Sino cultural sphere, I would like to introduce Ashi Tōzan’s most representative works Mukeiroku and Sojihyōen 楚辭評苑 in order to shed lights on this unknown Confucianist and his achievement.

Personas of eccentricity 狂 (C. kuang; J. kyô) emerged very early in Chinese texts and had a far-reaching influence in East Asian literary traditions. This paper traces the formation and transformation of the aesthetics of deliberate eccentricity in pre-modern Chinese and Japanese poetry. What are the distinctive characteristics of the eccentrics? Why deliberate eccentricity is considered a poetic quality? What philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic ideas are celebrated with the eccentric personas? How the poetics of eccentricity transmitted and transformed over time and across cultures? This paper explores these questions by examining selected eccentric personas in Chinese poetry from the Wen-Jin (220-420) and Tang-Song (618-907; 960-1279) periods, and in Japanese poetry written by the Five Mountains Buddhist priests and by Edo haikai poets. Relevant Confucian and Daoist texts are examined in discussing the social, cultural and philosophical contexts.

While literary scholars active today concur that Japan’s Sinitic poetry merits serious attention, numerous questions remain about the nature of this textual corpus and its relationship to Sinitic poetic traditions outside of Japan. How can we balance sensitivity to the specificity of local conditions (manifest in diction, cultural reference, or recitational practices) while also taking account of the fact that writing Sinitic verse was a means by which Japanese poets insinuated themselves into a broader regional tradition? How did Japanese practitioners of Sinitic poetry understand their craft? What textual models did they cite and why? The large body of shiwa 詩話 (“poetry talks”) published from mid-Edo into Meiji offers an important source to address these questions. In addition to identifying exemplary verses, Japanese shiwa authors reflected upon the nature of Sinitic poetic expression, its aims, its development, and sometimes the particular challenges that Japanese poets faced. This paper examines Emura Hokkai’s Nihon shishi (1770), the first comprehensive literary history of Japan’s Sinitic poetry tradition, looking in particular at how Hokkai situated Japanese literary production alongside continental examples. It also compares his approach to subsequent attempts by Meiji-era Sinitic poets and scholars of Japanese literary history to recount this history.

This paper explores various topics in Huang’s poems, which were composed between 1872 and 1890 and to which are appended paragraph-length prose notes; these include: transmission of Chinese Works to Japan, lost Chinese works recovered in Japan, classical Chinese studies in Japan, Japanese Neo-Confucianism, Japanese history written in Japan, Japanese masters of ancient-style Chinese prose, classical Chinese verse written in Japan, rise and fall of Chinese classical verse in Japan, Chinese calligraphy and painting preserved in Japan, preservation of Chinese writings in Japan, Buddhism in Japan, Shinto and Daoism, Japanese folk songs, arts of the geisha, Japanese gardens, Japanese theatre, tea ceremony, Japanese cuisine, Japanese music and musical instruments, waka (indigenous Japanese poetry), and Japanese arts and crafts (painting, calligraphy, pottery, other crafts). Huang was able to explore these worlds of Meiji era culture via the then ubiquitous kanji (Chinese character) culture then prevailing in Japan. His are the perspectives and insights of a late Qing Chinese erudite literatus; the scope and depth of his analysis is unique for a non-Japanese visitor at that time. Intimately acquainted with significant Japanese bunjin (literati) who served as his informants, Huang had full access to the thought, literature, and arts of the early Meiji era, and consequently produced far more sophisticated analysis and critiques of them than any Western observer then could. Huang did not flaunt any sense of Chinese cultural superiority, but on the contrary found much in Japan to admire. In fact, he soon came to view the Meiji experiment as the best model for China to follow: modernization but with firm roots in traditional culture.

In much Western-language scholarship, kanbun is spoken of as being written “in Chinese.” Some scholars modify the formulation by saying it is “in literary Chinese” or “written in Chinese style.” Mori Ōgai”s kanshi present an interesting case, since approaching the poems in these terms not only affects how we understand his work, but also how we might view (in terms of a possible future taxonomy?) other texts of “‘Sinitic’ writing.” Many of Ōgai”s kanshi are recognizable as literary Chinese in terms of diction, word order, rhyme scheme, and even tonal rules. Certain locutions he uses, however, are influenced by traditional Chinese vernacular language: e.g. 負笈來 and 獲熊歸. Still others fit more directly the rubric modern vernacular Chinese: e.g., 幾個 and 似個. More interesting (and problematic) are the expressions influenced by Japanese. In some cases, a kundoku glossing of the text (as with the first two phrases above) reveals just how natural the text reads as ‘Japanese’: e.g. 帶笑看 warai o obite-min, and 求良冶得ryōya o motome-ete. In some cases, Ōgai uses terms that are incomprehensible without knowledge of Japanese: e.g., 浦山敷 for urayamashiku. And in still others, the wordplay makes sense only when the Chinese characters are given a Japanese reading: e.g., 蓑 mino and 箕 mino. In part for these reasons, others would prefer the term “Sino-Japanese” for kanbun.

This paper traces the shifting dynamic of Sino-Japanese knowledge exchange in the critical turn-of-the-twentieth-century moment. Its primary concern is with vernacular (minjian 民間) rather than elite knowledge, and its focus is on one particular genre of texts, wanbao quanshu 萬寶全書 (comprehensive compendia of myriad treasures). Published from the late Ming dynasty through the turn of the twentieth century, these texts were expanded from the 1890s when supplements were added to the core sections of the compendia.

After introducing the wanbao quanshu genre, the paper contrasts the intensive Japanese scholarly interest in late Ming Chinese wanbao quanshu both in the Edo period and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the apparent lack of Japanese interest —again, both historically and today—in the later stage of development of wanbao quanshu. This can be attributed to profound shift in the Sino-Japanese balance of knowledge and power in the Meiji and late Qing periods, a shift that is manifest in the new Japanese orientation towards Western knowledge which they appropriated into the new genre of baike quanshu 百科全書 (encyclopedias).

To further highlight this East Asian epistemic shift, I focus on one particular wanbao quanshu supplement on botany which draws on an early Qing text, the Huajing 花镜 (Mirror of flowers). Given the long history of the Huajing in both China and Japan, it is a potentially productive avenue for analyzing changing Sino-Japanese epistemic relations in the age of global science.

This paper looks at Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 (ca. 365–427) legacy to the rhyme-prose (cifu 辭賦) traditions in Korea. A highly ornate poetic style, rhyme-prose had evolved in China since the Han (206 BCE–220), but only became popular in Korea in the Chosŏn period. Tao’s poetry was introduced from China into Korea as early as in the Goryeo period (also Koryŏ 高麗, 918–1392). During the long Chosŏn dynasty that followed, Tao’s influence overlapped with that of Neo-Confucianism. Transmitted also from China, Neo-Confucianism valorized a rarefied and illuminating spirit, nurtured by assiduous self-cultivation, which resonated with Tao’s plainness and optimism that transcended mundane concerns. This case study illustrates, then, the multifaceted interaction between literature and Neo-Confucian philosophy in Sinitic poetry. It also enriches a traditional Chinese understanding of Tao’s intellectual orientation.

Korean intellectuals who arrived at the Southern China, in particular, tried to communicate with the local people in Chinese (漢字) or by Chinese poems (漢詩) revealing their pride in Korean Confucian traditions without losing their fortitude and dignity, and thereby they earned the patronage and esteem of Chinese intellectuals. As one of successful examinees of liberal arts in the fifteenth century and the best intellectual among the people adrift on the sea, Ch'oe Pu (崔溥) outstandingly performed in China. In addition, after his returning to Chosŏn，P'yohae-rok the book as ordered by King Sŏngjong (成宗) had a great impact on not only within Chosŏn but also overseas. When Li Pangik (李邦翼) the military officer of Cheju (濟州) in the eighteenth century arrived at P'enghu (澎湖) Island in Taiwan and went north by way of Fujian, he paid a visit to the Confucian shrine and so gained respect from the local people. It seems like Li Pangik’s Yueyang-lou (岳陽樓) visit was deluded. Right after he came back to Korea, Li Pangik did not mention it. However, it suddenly came out when he met Chongjo(正祖). It is shown that Li Pangik even did not know where Yueyang-lou. Park Chiwŏn conducted historical and geographical research on several places, and he presumed that Li Pangik, who was unfamiliar with the geography of China, mistook a byname of Tai-hu nearby Suzhou, East-Dongting for Dongting-hu(洞庭湖) at Hunan(湖南). This was because his travel route looked quite unreasonable to understand. Rhetorical expressions were added to P’yohae-ga (漂海歌) that Li Pangik went to west by ship in order to see Yueyang-lou. P’yohae-rok (漂海錄) states that he tried to see Yueyang-lou even if they lost time for the journey. It seems to be added using their pre-knowledge of Yueyang-lou and Dongting-hu. It is reasonable that this phenomenon should be seen as rhetorical exaggeration while P’yohae-rok was written. Chang Hanchul(張漢喆)’s P’yohae-rok also shows this kind of fictions. As a comprehensive intellectual, Ch'oe Tuchan (崔斗燦), who had been adrift in the sea around Cheju and finally arrived at Ning Po(寜波) in China in the early nineteenth century, widely exchanged with Chinese writers about poems and seemed to write the draft of Sŭngsa-rok（乘槎錄）since he was adrift。He returned to Korea through Beijing and Shenyang, along the Jinghang (京杭) Grand Canal. As shown in the examples above, Chosŏn was closed externally but some who had been lost in the sea were passionate about recording the customs and culture of the Southern China and communicating with local writers by taking the opportunity of unexpected travel to the place where was hard of access at the time。We can assume that Today’s worldwide dynamic characteristics of Korean were not built in a day.

The New Treatise on Military Efficiency (Jixiao xinshu 紀效新書), written by the famous Ming general Qi Jiguang 戚繼光 (1528–88), also spread its influence in Korea. Qi won respect in Korea for leading his Zhejiang Army to resist the sixteenth century Japanese invasions. The Chosŏn court managed to acquire his New Treatise and invited generals from the Zhejiang Army to help reconstruct the Korean military and train Korean soldiers using Qi’s manual. With this case study, the author demonstrates that the influence of some works written in literary Chinese extended far beyond the realms of literature and art, producing unforeseen sociopolitical changes in various parts of the Sinosphere.

The Chosŏn envoys’ visits to China and to Japan entailed complicated cultural interactions and occasional conflicts. During the Ming dynasty, envoys of Chosŏn who were sent to Beijing wanted to learn about China and the West (i.e. the practical influence of the Jesuits), and regarded their visits at the Ming capital as “having an audience with Heaven” (jocheon 朝天). At the same time, the Korean messengers (tongshinsa-heng-won 通信使行員) sent to Japan were warmly welcomed for transmitting Chinese culture to Japanese intellectuals. But during the seventeenth-century, there was no conscious effort on the part of the Koreans to learn from the non-Chinese Qing dynasty. It was only in the mid-eighteenth century that a movement directed toward the receipt of “Northern Learning” (pukhak 北學) from the Qing was made by pioneering Korean intellectuals. Subsequently, the Japanese gradually lost their respect for China and Korean while turning their sights to the West. What caused these dramatic changes, and what were the short- and long-term cultural consequences?

This paper investigates the travels of collections of pure-word essays (cheongeon sopum 淸言小品) from China into Korea and Japan after the sixteenth century, including Ice in a Jade Jar (Okhobing 玉壺氷) and Vegetable-Root Talks (Chaegeundam 菜根譚). Although both works were largely forgotten in their native place—possibly because Qing scholars criticized late Ming enthusiasm over “light” stories of this sort¬—they were appreciated in Korea and Japan and inspired new literary trends in their adopted homes. Ice in a Jade Jar was widely read in Chosŏn Korea, while the Vegetable-Root Talks was most valued in Japan. The author will examine the reasons behind these choices, and their significance for an understanding of the way texts travel.

Our basic focus in this conference is on historical processes—in particular, the specific ways that people, products (especially texts), ideas and cultural practices travel within, and especially move beyond, local, regional and national boundaries. I choose to call this process “transnationalism”—even though it began well before the invention of nation-states. Our conference goal, as stated in our NEH proposal, is 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 forth. Instead, we plan to view each culture and each state as conceptually equivalent, thus avoiding the prejudices so often imposed by a single perspective. When seen in this way, documents written in the literary Sinitic can no longer be considered simply as the extended products of Chinese culture; rather, they become—as they always were, in fact—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 the literary Sinitic dominated elite written discourse; it does not privilege China in any way. My hope is that this paper will contribute in some measure to this sort of understanding. It focuses on three simple questions: (1) How did the Yijing 易經 (aka Zhou Changes 周易) travel to other parts of East Asia? (2) Why did the host culture adopt it and for what specific purposes? (3) What happened to the text after it was adopted? The answers to these questions, however, are predictably complex. What I propose to do in this paper is to offer a brief summary of these processes as they occurred in Tokugawa徳川Japan (1603-1868), Lê 黎朝 (1428-1789) and early Nguyễn 阮朝 (1802–1945) dynasty Vietnam, and Chosŏn朝鮮Korea (1392–1910).