Publisher's Synopsis
"For hundreds of years, into the twentieth century, the culture groups in the areas we now know as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam shared a great many political and social values, religious beliefs, and artistic and literary traditions. These common cultural features were recorded and transmitted in the same basic written language-classical or literary Chinese (known as guwen/wenyan in China, Kanbun in Japan, Hanmun in Korea, and Hánvan in Vietnam). The umbrella term for this shared language is "literary Sinitic"-a term designed to recognize the fact that although guwen/wenyan originally developed in China, it had a vibrant life of its own in other areas of East Asia (i.e., what this study terms the Sinosphere). This huge but understudied body of written documents offers extraordinarily rich resources for examining issues of cultural continuity and change in this important region of the world. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the pol
