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Languages, Scripts, and Chinese

Texts in East Asia
Languages, Scripts, and

Chinese Texts in East Asia
P e t e r F r a n c i s Ko r n i c k i
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© Peter Francis Kornicki 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
‘All under the heavens use the same writing’

(Doctrine of the mean)
Dedicated with love to my parents:

Franciszek Kornicki
(18 December 1916–16 November 2017)
Patience Ceridwen Kornicka
(31 August 1923–26 November 2017)
Preface
This book has its origins in the fourteenth annual conference of SHARP, the
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, which was held in
The Hague and Leiden in July 2006. The organizers of the conference invited me
to give one of the three keynote lectures and in doing so to address the conference
theme, which ‘highlighted the importance of the European and the North
American heritage for the book and print cultures of the world’. They expected me
to demonstrate how important European books had been for Japan. Churlishly
enough, I pointed out how absurd this expectation was, given that Chinese books
and texts had been far more important to Japan than European books for most of
the last two thousand years. Therefore, I said, I could only speak in such a way as
to undermine the theme. Kindly overlooking my tactless response, the organizers
accepted that my approach would be different. In my lecture, it seemed to me best
to demonstrate the role that Chinese books had played not only in Japan but also
in Korea and Vietnam as well, to make it clear that I was not making a parochial
point about Japan alone. This forced me to revive my rusty Korean in a hurry and
to make my first trip to Hanoi, early in 2006. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that
I am first and foremost indebted to the organizers of the SHARP conference, with-
out whom I would never have embarked on this ambitious and apparently endless
enquiry, and to one of my fellow speakers, Robert Darnton, who encouraged me
to pursue the topic.
I have been fortunate enough to have had many opportunities to develop my
ideas and to benefit from advice, correction, and friendly criticism ever since that
conference in Leiden. In March 2008, I developed my arguments at much greater
length in the Sandars Lectures at the University Library, Cambridge, which were
later made available online in an annotated version. Subsequently I have taken the
arguments further at conferences, workshops, or lectures at (in chronological
order) Hangzhou, Nishōgakusha University (Tokyo), the University of Venice Ca’
Foscari, the Academy of Korean Studies (Seoul), Barnard College (New York),
Columbia University, Princeton University, the Royal Asiatic Society Korea
Branch, the Collège de France, Oberlin College, Yale University, the Asan Institute
(Seoul), Brown University, Harvard University, Leiden University, the École prat-
ique des hautes études (Paris), the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan), Cornell
University, the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (Hanoi), Rice University
(Houston), and Ohio State University (Columbus). To the participants on all these
occasions, in most cases far more expert than me, I am greatly indebted for gentle
correction, generous advice, and lively discussion.
As is obvious, the geographical area and chronological scope covered by this
book are impossibly broad for one person to master. I have made up for my lack
of expertise by drawing upon a wide spectrum of secondary literature, particularly
in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English. This necessarily brings with it some
x Preface
distortion, for there are vast secondary literatures in Chinese and Japanese, some-
what less large in Korean although growing rapidly, and still rather small in
Vietnamese. As a result, Japan and Korea figure rather more fully in this book
than Vietnam, which I regret.
As far as possible, however, I have tried to base this book upon the evidence
furnished by manuscripts and early printed books in literary Chinese and other
languages which were produced in various parts of East Asia. I have been unusually
dependent upon the inestimable goodwill of countless librarians from New York to
Seoul and from Hanoi to Tokyo who have put aside their own work to provide
unstinting help and good advice. In Britain, the University Library at Cambridge
has been an indispensable home-base, especially the Aston Collection of early
Japanese books and the Wade Collection of Chinese books, and I am deeply
indebted to Noboru Koyama and Charles Aylmer for their astute librarianship
over many years. Elsewhere, the antiquarian and modern collections of the British
Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the library of the School of Oriental
and African Studies in London have been particularly valuable. Professor Naganuma
Ken of Dōshisha University has on several occasions kindly provided me with
scans of articles inaccessible in Britain.
All research trips cost money, and to those who provided it I am grateful
beyond measure: the Japan Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Japan
Foundation Endowment Committee, the University of Cambridge, Robinson
College (Cambridge), and the Association for South East Asian Studies UK. To
the Warden and Fellows of Robinson College, Cambridge, I am deeply grateful
for permission to absent myself from my duties as Deputy Warden of the College
for nine months in 2010 and on various other occasions.
This book is in many ways the culmination of more than thirty years of work,
and it certainly would not have been within my capabilities to undertake it much
earlier. Nor would it have been possible had I not revived my undergraduate
Korean in a hurry with the connivance of my Cambridge colleagues, Mark Morris
and John Nilsson-Wright, and had I not found a Japanese-speaking colleague in
Hanoi, Nguyễn Thị Oanh, to guide my first encounters with Vietnamese books.
Apart from those already mentioned, I owe particular thanks to Peter Fox, then
University Librarian at Cambridge, who invited me to give the Sandars Lectures in
2008. I have benefited enormously from the advice and opinions of Peter Burke,
Anne Cheng, Wiebke Denecke, Benjamin Elman, Joshua Fogel, Simon Franklin,
Imre Galambos, Ross King, Rainier Lanselle, David Lurie, Sven Osterkamp, Shang
Wei, Haruo Shirane, Brian Steininger, Roel Sterckx, Daniel Trambaiolo, Thorsten
Traulsen, John Tucker, Sem Vermeersch, and a former graduate student, Rebekah
Clements. In addition, Wim Boot, Richard Bowring, Joshua Fogel, Clive Holes,
Kate Wildman Nakai, Jonathan Silk, and Keith Taylor were kind enough to read
chapters or parts and to give me the benefit of their expert knowledge. Imre
Galambos, Barend ter Haar, Ross King, and my wife, Francesca Orsini, laboured
through the whole manuscript and it has benefited enormously from their com-
ments and criticisms: I am deeply and humbly grateful. In the final stages of revision
I had the huge good fortune to enjoy the stimulating company of Linda Chance,
Preface xi
Roger Chartier, Julie Nelson Davis, Lynne Farrington, John Pollack, and Peter
Stallybrass at the University of Pennsylvania. Francesca has lived with this book for
ten years and has nurtured it with encouragement, constructive criticism, and love.
This book is dedicated to my parents, who took great interest in its progress
and hoped to see it published in their lifetimes. Sadly, they did not quite live long
enough. Theirs was a marriage made by the Second World War. My father grew
up in rural Poland; he worked his way through school by teaching younger pupils
and, unable to afford university, went to the Air Force Academy at Dęblin, gradu-
ating in the summer of 1939 as a fighter pilot. He came 3rd out of a class of 173.
Having survived the initial onslaught of the Luftwaffe and the Soviet invasion, he
escaped to France and then Britain, where the Polish Air Force was re-formed;
he became the youngest squadron commander in the Polish Air Force and was the
last one surviving when he died in November 2017. He remained in Britain after
the war, appalled by the outcome of the Yalta Conference, which ceded control of
Poland to the Soviet Union. My mother grew up in England and, against the wishes
of her parents, served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, which was the women’s
branch of the British Army during the Second World War. She was unable to fulfil
her dream of going to art college and only in later life rediscovered her artistic
talents, which sadly have not been passed on to me but have reappeared in the
next generation. I dedicate this book to them with filial gratitude and love.
London
December 2017
Contents
List of Illustrations and Maps xv
List of Table and Boxes xvii
Chronologies xix
Dynasties and Periods xxi
Names xxiii
Geography xxv
Abbreviations and References xxix
Introduction 1
I . O r i e n tat i o n s
1. Sinitic in a Global Perspective 25
2. Scripts and Writing 42
3. The Oral Dimension 72
4. Material Texts: Manuscripts, Xylography, and Typography 103
5. Book Roads and Routes 130
II . R e a d i n g a n d T r a n s l at i n g
6. Reading Sinitic Texts in the Vernaculars 157
7. Written Vernacular Translation 187
III . C h i n e s e T e x t s a n d t h e V e r n a c u l a r s
8. The Chinese Buddhist Canon and Other Buddhist Texts 217
9. Classics, Examinations, and Confucianism 246
10. Primers, Medical Texts, and Other Works 272
Conclusion: Sinitic and the Evolution of Vernacular

Societies in East Asia 297
Bibliography 313
Index 377
List of Illustrations and Maps

Figures
I.1. Map of Japan showing connections with Korea and the
Ryūkyū kingdom to the south 4
2.1. Some of the symbols said by Hirata Atsutane in 1819 to be the
ancient writing of the Japanese 46
2.2. An extract from the Tangut translation of the Art of war (Sunzi)62
2.3. So-called ‘variant kana’ (hentaigana) as seen in a conduct book for
women published in 1790 66
3.1. Japanese furigana glosses (on left) and Korean han’gŭl glosses
(on right) in print in the titles of two books 79
3.2. The opening page of a Vietnamese edition (1837) of the rhyme
dictionary Shiyun jiyao81
3.3. A selection of handy insults from a Korean manual of
spoken Chinese 86
3.4. The first page of a collection of Manchu texts with Sinitic
translations in the lower register 89
3.5. Okajima Kanzan’s Tōin gakuyō 唐音學庸, a combined edition of
the Great learning and the Doctrine of the mean published in 1727 96
3.6. A page from the bilingual Tangut-Chinese timely pearl in the hand
(Fanhan heshi zhangzhong zhu), printed in 1190 99
4.1. A page from Tōsō Kaiso jijojō (Ch. Tang seng Huai Su zixu tie)
唐僧懐素自叙帖, printed in Japan in 1661 107
4.2. Korean ritual furniture from a guide to etiquette published in
1844 (Sarye p’yŏllam 四禮便覧)111
4.3. The Compendium to the Elementary learning 小學集成113
4.4. The first page of Zhu Xi’s preface to the Great learning in a bilingual
Manchu-Chinese edition of the Four Books printed in 1756 120
6.1. The opening page of Shinpen Igaku shōden 新編醫學正傳, a Japanese
edition of the Authentic tradition of medicine (Yixue zhengchuan)161
6.2. Symbol glosses used in the Tōdaiji temple in Nara 173
6.3. The thirteen dots from the top right square of Figure 6.2
superimposed on the Chinese character for ‘book’ or ‘writing’ 174
6.4. A Tang-dynasty study of the Lotus sūtra printed in Kyoto in 1595
in 100 copies 175
6.5. A page from the 1670 edition of the Kyoto booksellers’ catalogue
of books in print 176
xvi List of Illustrations and Maps

7.1. Subtle discussions between the Yellow Emperor and the plain lady
(Kōso myōron 黄素妙論), printed with movable type in 1599 193
7.2. An eighteenth-century Korean edition of the Great learning199
7.3. A Korean book on equine medicine compiled in the early
seventeenth century 202
7.4. A Vietnamese compilation on Pure Land Buddhism printed in
1848, with the Sinitic in the upper register and a verse translation
into 6–8 rhythm in the lower register 207
8.1. This extract from a version of the Flower Ornament sūtra designed
for devotional copying 232
9.1. A late eighteenth-century edition of the Great learning, part of the
Keiten yoshi edition of the Four Books edited by Tani Hyakunen 264
10.1. Final page of the 1604 Japanese edition of the Thousand character
classic, showing the same text in four different calligraphic styles 274
10.2. The Chinese character meaning ‘heaven’, ‘sky’, from a Korean
edition of the Thousand character classic276
10.3. The title of the 1833 Vietnamese edition of the Three character classic277
10.4. Edition of the Three character classic published in Saigon in 1917 278
10.5. Hayashi Razan’s translation of the Essentials of government in the
Zhenguan reign (Jōgan seiyō genkai), published in 1669 289
10.6. A Japanese translation by Hirose Chikuan of the American
part of Wei Yuan’s Illustrated treatise on the maritime kingdoms,
published in 1854 295
C.1. The opening page of the Abbreviated history of all the nations
(Manguk yaksa)311
Maps
1. East Asia showing the locations of polities that no longer exist xxvi
2. The Korean peninsula during the Three Kingdoms period (up to 668) xxvii
List of Table and Boxes
Ta bl e
1.1. Variations in current written forms 27
B ox e s
2.1. Writing foreign names using Chinese characters 55
2.2. Vocal realizations of Chinese characters 56
2.3. Han’gŭl68
3.1. Long-term sojourners in China 74
4.1. Xylography in other societies 119
6.1. Example of a semantic reading 163
6.2. Manuscripts reflecting the transmission of vernacular reading
from Korea to Japan 167
6.3. A part of the Analects with Tani Hyakunen’s commentary 181
7.1. Sanskrit terminology in Chinese translations 189
7.2. Kumazawa Banzan’s commentary 194
7.3. The Abbreviated explanation of the Four books205
7.4. Confucian terminology in Manchu 212
Chronologies
Conceptions of time and chronology in East Asia pose considerable practical
problems. This is because the lunar calendar was in common use until the nine-
teenth or twentieth century, and also because the systems of reckoning years did
not follow a single linear sequence. Two methods of counting the years were in
common use. One of these was the sexagenary cycle of sixty years in which each
year was indicated by a combination of two Chinese characters. The same pair of
characters recurred every sixty years, so contemporaries had no difficulty in iden-
tifying the year in question, but we in the twenty-first century sometimes have
great difficulty deciding to which particular cycle a given year belongs.1
The other method made use of era names (nianhao), a Chinese technique for
dividing up time that was adopted sooner or later throughout East Asia. An era
name applied to an era that lasted no more than a couple of decades, and some-
times was much shorter than that. Often eras were brought to an end by a natural
disaster or political crisis, which prompted a need for renewal. A new era was then
declared and an auspicious name given to it. The years were counted until this was
in turn replaced by a new era with a new name. Up to 1368 in China, 1392 in
Korea, 1802 in Vietnam, and 1868 in Japan, era names did not coincide with
reigns; in fact, some reigns were divided into two or more eras with different
names. From the Ming dynasty onwards in China, but in Japan only from 1868,
era names coincided with reigns and are therefore sometimes called reign names.
These era or reign names provide a fixed point of reference: thus in China the
Kangxi era lasted from 1662 to 1722, so the fifth year of the Kangxi era corres-
ponds more or less, allowing for differences between the lunar calendar used in
East Asia and the Gregorian calendar used in Europe, to the year 1666; in Japan
this was instead the sixth year of the Kanbun era, in Korea this year was referred to
by the Chinese reign name Kanghŭi (the Korean pronunciation of Kangxi) or as
the eighth year of the Korean king Hyŏnjong, and in Vietnam it was referred to as
the fourth year of the Cảnh Trị era. At various times, some East Asian societies
used the Chinese era names, but for reasons of national pride they mostly preferred
to use their own, with the exception of Korea between 963 and 1895: for most of
the Koryŏ (918–1392) and the Chosŏn dynasties (1392–1897) Korea used Chinese
era names in Korean pronunciation together with the names of the successive
Korean kings.
In order to render comparisons possible and for the sake of clarity, years will be
given here in their Western equivalents; when more precise dates are necessary,
they will be given in the lunar calendar, thus 1666.1.22 refers to the twenty-second
day of the first month of 1666, which actually corresponds to what in Europe was
the 5th of February 1666. When dealing with events recorded in both European
1 For details see Wilkinson 2015, 509–19.

xx Chronologies
and East Asian documents, which naturally give dates in conformity with their
own different calendrical traditions, it is, of course, essential to understand what
the dates recorded in the East Asian calendars exactly correspond to in the Julian
or, after 1582, the Gregorian calendar. Apart from these special circumstances,
there seems to me no benefit in giving the Julian or Gregorian date instead of that
used in East Asia, so I shall not follow here what used to be the common practice
of rendering all dates into the Julian or Gregorian calendars.
It is as a result of these differences between the lunar calendar on the one hand
and the Julian and Gregorian calendars on the other that there are some differences
in the birth and death dates assigned to historical figures. Somebody born in China
in the closing days of the fifth year of the Kangxi era could be assigned a birth year
of 1666, following the lunar calendar, or of 1667, following the Gregorian calen-
dar. Furthermore, the method of reckoning ages was such that you were one at
birth and became two years old on the first day of the next new year, so there is
some variation in the ages assigned to historical figures in East Asian and Western
reference books.
Dynasties and Periods
China Japan Korea Vietnam

Qin dynasty
221 bce–206 bce
Former Han dynasty
206 bce–9 ce
Later Han dynasty
25–220
Three Kingdoms
220–280
Jin dynasty
265–420
Northern & Southern Three Kingdoms
dynasties 420–589 Kofun of Paekche,
250–538 Koguryŏ, & Silla Chinese
?–668 domination
Sui dynasty Asuka 43–544, 602–938
581–618 538–710
Ngô and Đinh dynasties
Tang dynasty Nara period Unified Silla 939–980
618–907 710–794 668–935
Early Lê dynasty
Heian period 980–1009
Song dynasty 794–1185 Koryŏ dynasty
960–1276 918–1392 Lý dynasty
1009–1225
Yuan dynasty Kamakura period Trần dynasty
1271–1368 1185–1333 1225–1400
Chosŏn dynasty
Ming dynasty Muromachi period 1392–1897 Ming domination
1368–1644 1333–1600 1407–1427
Later Lê dynasty
1428–1788
Tây Sơn dynasty
Qing dynasty Edo period 1778–1802
1644–1911 1600–1868
Korean empire Nguyễn dynasty
1897–1910 1802–1887
Republic Meiji period Japanese colony French colony
1912–1949 1868–1912 1910–1945 1887–1945
Names
Personal names will be given here in their standard East Asian order, with family
name preceding given name. Buddhist monks and nuns throughout East Asia
customarily assumed two-character religious names on the Chinese pattern; in
Vietnamese these are romanized as two separate elements (e.g., Viên Chiḗu), in
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean as a single name (e.g., Fazang, Kūkai, Musang).
Throughout East Asia, males often had a variety of names to draw upon, including
one or more pen-names and religious names. To avoid confusion only one form
will be used here, namely the standard forms found in biographical dictionaries,
which usually consist of family name and most common pen-name.
There is a particular difficulty with the proper names used in the Ryūkyū king-
dom. Many intellectuals in the kingdom used both Chinese-style three-part names
and a local system of family and personal names. Since the former Ryūkyū king-
dom is now part of Japan, both of these names tend to be rendered in Japan today
in accordance with Japanese phonology. Even though the Okinawan language is
closely related to Japanese, the Japanese writing system is singularly ill-suited to the
phonology of Okinawan. With some reluctance, I shall follow the convention of
referring to individuals from the Ryūkyū kingdom by their Chinese-style three-
character names in Japanese pronunciation (e.g., Tei Junsoku).
Place names will be given in their romanized forms using pinyin for Chinese,
modified Hepburn for Japanese, and McCune–Reischauer for Korean, except for
those that are familiar in the West (e.g., Hanoi, Seoul, Kyoto). In the case of those
that are now known by other names, the modern version will be given in brackets:
for example, Edo (Tokyo).
The co-existence of literary Chinese with a wide range of spoken languages in
which literary Chinese texts can be articulated poses real problems in a book
addressed to a Western audience. What is to be done with a widely used title or
term normally written in Chinese characters and pronounced in dozens of differ-
ent ways, and how is it best to be represented in Roman script? A familiar example
will illustrate the problem. Most educated readers in East Asia would immediately
recognize 論語 as the title of a work known in English as the Analects of Confucius,
but they would pronounce it in different ways according to their mother tongue:
Lunyu, Rongo, Non’ŏ, and Luận ngữ are the current standard Mandarin, Japanese,
Korean, and Vietnamese pronunciations respectively. For the most part, I shall use
English renderings in the text and provide further details in the index. Thus, I shall
refer to the Analects, not to Lunyu, Rongo, Non’ŏ, or Luận ngữ. Purists will object
but others will, I hope, welcome a strategy that will reduce the percentage of
unfamiliar italics.
The names of Buddhist sects or schools and the titles of Buddhist scriptures pose
problems. The schools will be referred to where possible by their English names,
such as Pure Land Buddhism, with characters provided in the index. But this is not
xxiv Names
always possible, as for example in the case of meditative Buddhism (禪), which is
known as Zen in Japanese, Sŏn in Korean, and Thiền in Vietnamese; the Chinese
name from which all of these derive, Chan, is thought to be a phonetic loan from
the Sanskrit dhyāna, ‘meditation’, and no English translation of the term in its East
Asian context has been attempted. ‘Zen’ is probably the most familiar in English,
but that does not justify using it indiscriminately, so I shall use the Chinese name
Chan as the standard.
For the titles of books and scriptures, I shall use an English title where possible.
The full titles will be found in the index along with the Chinese characters in the
case of works written in East Asia.
Geography
Frequent reference is made in this book to polities or localities that do not exist
today (see Map 1). Some of these polities are treated in current historiography as if
they were Chinese ‘dynasties’ that just happened to be ruled by ‘minorities’ and
they are usually referred to by their Chinese names: this is true of the Khitan state,
commonly referred to as the ‘Liao dynasty’, and the Jurchen state, referred to as the
‘Jin dynasty’. I shall not be following this sinocentric practice in this book and shall
instead refer to the Khitan and Jurchen states by those names. Brief notes on each
of these polities follow.
The Dunhuang Commandery was established around 100 bce and it became an
important outpost on the Silk Road. Dunhuang is known for the Mogao caves, a
complex of Buddhist caves which were found in 1900 to contain a huge quantity
of documents dating from the fourth to eleventh centuries. The Dunhuang manu-
scripts are now scattered all over the world with particularly large collections in the
Bibliothèque nationale de France (collected by Paul Pelliot), the British Library
(collected by Aurel Stein), the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg,
the National Library of China, and numerous other institutions in China, Russia,
Japan, and elsewhere.1
The Jurchen kingdom (also known as the Jin dynasty) was founded in 1115 by
the Jurchens and, after overthrowing the Khitan (Liao) state and the Northern
Song dynasty, the Jurchens occupied northern and north-eastern China and had a
common border with Korea. The Jurchens became increasingly drawn towards
China and Buddhism flourished there, but in 1234 the kingdom was overrun by
the Mongols and it came to an end. In 1635 the Jurchen people changed their
ethnonym to Manchu (see below).
The Khitan empire, or Liao dynasty, was founded by a Khitan clan in 907, the
year in which the Tang dynasty collapsed, and it covered parts of northern China,
Manchuria, and Mongolia. Buddhism flourished there, but the Khitans were over-
whelmed by the Jurchen (Jin) dynasty in 1125. The Khitan language was without
a script until in the ninth century the so-called ‘large script’ and then the ‘small
script’, both modelled on Chinese characters, were developed.
The kingdom of Koguryŏ (also known as Goguryeo) was one of the three early
states on the Korean peninsula until in 668 it was overthrown by its southern
neighbour, Silla. The territory of Koguryŏ at its peak covered not only the northern
half of the Korean peninsula but also a large swathe of territory to the north in
what are now the Chinese provinces of Jilin, Liaoning, and Heilongjiang (see
Map 2). Koguryŏ was at war with both the Sui and Tang dynasties of China and
finally fell to persistent attacks mounted by Tang and Silla in alliance.
1 See the website of the International Dunhuang Project: http://idp.bl.uk/.

Ulaanbaatar
EKISTAN Almaty
Khitans

MONGOLIA Hokkaido
Bishkek
hken
KYRGYZSTAN Ürümqi Uighurs Sapporo
Dushanbe Manchus Viadivostok
Jurchens Parhae
Kashi
TAJIKISTAN NORTH Sea of
G. Tanguts Tieling KOREA Japan
ul Cease-Fire Line Beijing Pyongyang
Demarcation
Yinchuan Tianjin Dalian Line
Indian Seoul SOUTH Tokyo
Chinese Golmud
claim Lanzhou
line of Jinan KOREA
AK. control Osaka
Huang H e
CHINA Zhengzhou Kitakyushu Shikoku
Xi’an
New Delhi Nanjing Kyushu
Shanghai
Lhasa Chang Jia
ng Wuhan East
NEPAL Chengdu Hangzhou
Agra BHUTAN China
Kathmandu Chengqing Sea
Gang Thimphu Nanchang
e s
Varanasi utra Okinawa
Ryu-kyu-
Brahmap Fuzhou
BANGLADESH Kunming Guiyang Taipei
Dhaka
INDIA Chanesha
Calcutta Guangdong province
Nagpur Nanning
Dunhuang Guangzhou Taiwan
Hong Kong
Hanoi
BURMA Macau (U.K.)
Hyderabad LAOS Haiphong Pratas Philippine Sea
(PORT.)
Vishakhapatnam Islands
Vientiane Hainan
Chiang
Dao
Rangoon Mai
Bay of Paracel Luzon
Me
Bengal THAILAND Islands

kon
Madras Manila
g
Bangkok
Map 1. East Asia showing the locations of polities that no longer exist.
Geography xxvii
Harbin
Changchun
Viadivostok
Shenyang
Koguryŏ
NORTH
Tieling
KOREA
Pyóngyang
Demarcation
Dalian Line
Seoul
Silla
Jinan Paekche
Kitakyushu
Kyushu
Shanghai
Map 2. The Korean peninsula during the Three Kingdoms period (up to 668).
The Manchus. In 1616 a Jurchen leader called Nurhaci (1559–1626) turned his
back on the fading Ming dynasty and established the Later Jin dynasty in what is
now north-eastern China. He established his capital in Mukden, now Shenyang;
in 1635 his son changed their ethnonym from Jurchen to Manchu, supposedly
derived from the Buddhist deity Mañjuśrī, and in 1636 changed the name of the
dynasty to Qing. In 1644 the Manchus overthrew the Ming and moved their
capital to Beijing, inaugurating the Qing dynasty in China.2
The kingdom of Paekche (also known as Baekje) was one of the three early states
on the Korean peninsula, occupying the south-western corner until in 660 it was
overrun by its neighbour, Silla. It entered into tributary relations with several
Chinese dynasties, but it also enjoyed a close relationship with Japan and formed an
important conduit for the transmission of Buddhism and Chinese texts to Japan.3
The kingdom of Parhae (also known as Balhae) was founded in 698 by a general
from the Korean state of Koguryŏ after Koguryŏ was overrun by Tang armies, and its
ruling class included many Koguryŏ refugees. The kingdom occupied the Manchurian
plains to the north of the Korean peninsula, covering an area that includes parts of
what are now North Korea, north-east China, and the Russian Maritime Province.
The kingdom had close ties with Japan and sent as many as thirty-five missions to
Japan between 727 and 919. Parhae was overcome by the Khitans in 926.4
The Ryūkyū kingdom occupied the islands to the south of Japan that now form
Okinawa Prefecture. There were originally three states, but the central one,
Chūzan, overcame the other two in 1429 and the new kingdom had its centre at
Shuri castle, near what is now the city of Naha. By the fifteenth century Ryūkyū
had already been in contact with China, Japan, Korea, and other states for some
time, but relations with the Ming were particularly close: a bell cast in 1458 carries
an inscription, written by a Japanese monk, stating that, ‘Ryūkyū is located in a
2 On the Manchus see Crossley 1997.

3 Best 2006. 4 Adami 1994.
xxviii Geography
fine spot in the Southern Seas, gathers the best of what is in Korea, has a relation-
ship of mutual dependence with the Ming and with Japan is like lips and teeth.’5
In 1609 Ryūkyū was invaded by Satsuma, the large domain occupying the south-
ern part of Kyūshū in Japan, and for the next 250 years was in the anomalous
position of sending tributary missions to both Japan and China, with the know-
ledge of the former but without that of the latter. This peculiar arrangement
allowed the Ryūkyūans direct contact with China and provided Japan with a
means of acquiring books, medicines, and other goods indirectly from China. In
1879 Ryūkyū was fully absorbed into Japan and renamed Okinawa Prefecture,
bringing its independent identity as a state to an end.6
The kingdom of Silla was one of the three early states on the Korean peninsula,
occupying the south-eastern corner until in 660 it overcame its neighbour, Paekche,
and in 668 overthrew the northern kingdom of Koguryŏ to unify the peninsula.
The subsequent period is often referred to as Unified Silla, and it lasted for several
hundred years: after some decades of declining power it was overthrown and
replaced in 935 by the Koryŏ dynasty.7
The Tangut empire (also known as Xixia or Western Xia). The Tangut empire
covered a large area in what is now north-western China and dates back to 982. In
1038 the leader of the Tanguts, Li Yuanhao, declared himself emperor of Da Xia
(Great Xia) and demanded recognition as an equal from the Song emperor to the
east. The Tangut empire was multilingual and multi-ethnic, and survived until it
was overrun by the Mongols in 1227.8
The Uyghur (also Uighur) empire was established in the Orkhon valley in
Mongolia in the eighth century but this did not survive long; some survivors set-
tled in Gansu and were in the eleventh century absorbed by the Tangut empire,
while in the ninth century others founded a kingdom which survived up to the
thirteenth century, when it was absorbed by the Mongol empire. The Uyghurs
were a Turkic ethnic group and are now an officially recognized ethnic minority in
the People’s Republic of China.9
5 Uezato 1998, 4. 6 Akamine 2017. 7 McBride 2008.

8 Dunnell 1996. 9 Elverskog 1997.
Abbreviations and References

Abbreviations used in the text are as follows:
Ch = Chinese (Mandarin)
J = Japanese
K = Korean
M = Manchu
R = Ryūkyū
V = Vietnamese
In the footnotes, references are made to primary sources by title and to secondary sources
by surname of author and date. Full details of all sources used will be found in the
Bibliography along with a list of abbreviations.
Introduction
Scope and Objectives
This is an absurdly ambitious book, one that tries to cover a huge span of time as
well as a large swathe of territory in Asia where many different languages and
scripts have been used. Its objective is to examine the impact of the Chinese textual
tradition in East Asia and the changing roles of the vernaculars. What exactly is the
‘East Asia’ that is the focus of this book? It is not the usual triad of China, Japan,
and Korea, for it also includes many other societies: some of them, like Vietnam,
have survived as nation states, while others are ‘vanished kingdoms’, like those of
the Tanguts and the Khitans.1 Why, readers are entitled to ask, has this book been
conceived in this way?
The chief reason is that, sooner or later, all of these societies in East Asia encoun-
tered Chinese writing, and all of them faced similar problems when they were
confronted by the weight of the long-established Chinese textual tradition, for
they were all latecomers vis-à-vis China. A long process of acculturation, adaptation,
and vernacularization followed the encounter with China, and this bears at least
superficial similarities to the rise of the vernaculars as written languages in Europe,
South Asia, and the Middle East, and to the eventual displacement of Latin,
Sanskrit, Persian, and Quranic Arabic by various local languages. Sheldon Pollock
has led the way in the exploration of this global phenomenon, but there is a crucial
difference in East Asia. The difference lies in the fact that, unlike Latin, Sanskrit,
Persian, and Quranic Arabic, the language of the Chinese textual tradition was not
and never had been a spoken language. Even in China itself there were no native
speakers of literary Chinese, the language in which the earliest texts were written.
Oral communication therefore absolutely required the use of one vernacular or
another, both within China and elsewhere.
This book is intended to be a contribution to the study of the global phenom-
enon of vernacularization, which has at different times impacted upon large parts
of the world but has, as Pollock has pointed out, been strangely neglected.2 It thus
seeks to bring East Asia into the discourse on the roles played by languages of
learning and on the development of the vernaculars. For this reason, the first part
provides a substantial introduction to the problems of script, orality, material texts,
1 For the term ‘vanished kingdoms’, see Davies 2011. For brief accounts of the Tanguts, the
Khitans, and the peoples of other vanished kingdoms, see ‘Geography’, in the frontmatter above.
2 See Gould 2013 on vernacularization as a global phenomenon and the value of Pollock’s frame-
work for world literary history.
2 Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia
and the migration of texts in East Asia. This is followed by a detailed study of the
techniques for reading and translating Chinese texts, which eventually led to the
development of vernacular versions. The third and final part focuses on Buddhist,
Confucian, and other texts which circulated widely in their original forms but
gradually accrued layers of explanatory commentary, and were increasingly sub-
jected to vernacular explanation or translation. This is not, therefore, a book
primarily written for specialists on China, Japan, Korea, or Vietnam, though
I hope that they might gain something both from my attempts to place develop-
ments in East Asia in a much larger context and from my focus on the oral aspects
of textual study. Rather, it is written for readers with an interest in vernaculariza-
tion as a global phenomenon and an interest in the forms it took in East Asia.
This Introduction explores some key problems in geographic and linguistic
terminology relating to East Asia, starting with the concept of ‘East Asia’ itself.
There is a fine line to be trod here between etic and emic categories, that is to say,
between categories that may be familiar in the West but run the risk of Eurocen
trism, and, on the other hand, categories that may be authentic to East Asia but
run the risk of obscurity and bewilderment for Western readers. Since the ways in
which East Asian societies engaged with each other and the thinking that under-
pinned those engagements are significantly different from those that are familiar in
the West and they are, of course, important for understanding cultural interactions
in East Asia, an attempt needs to be made here to explore the unfamiliar. Finally,
after dealing with these issues of geography and language, I shall outline the
questions that this book sets out to answer.
‘ E a s t As i a’
This book deals with the circulation and interpretation of texts in East Asia, but
what is ‘East Asia’ if not an entirely artificial concept generated in Europe and
lacking any historical roots in the societies discussed here? The term ‘Asia’ itself,
which has its origins in ancient Greek and Roman geographical discourses, was
introduced by Europeans who travelled to East Asia in the sixteenth century, but it
was only in the nineteenth century that it became familiar to Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, and Vietnamese schoolchildren, who until then had no idea that they were
‘Asians’ who lived in ‘Asia’. To be sure, maps of the world which were taken to
China in the Ming dynasty by Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and were later dissem-
inated and reproduced in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, ensured that the extent of
the world that was known to Europeans gradually became common knowledge,
along with the conventional Western nomenclature of the continents.3 But the
very notion of inhabiting a region of the globe called ‘Asia’ required a very different
geographical imagination from those that held sway in East Asia up to the end of
the nineteenth century.4
3 Yee 1994, 170–7; Unno 1994, 404–10; Lee Chan 2005.

4 Holcombe is almost alone in acknowledging this and related issues: Holcombe 2001, 1–7. See also
Pelletier 2011 for a superb study of European notions of the geography and history of East Asia.
Introduction 3
Instead, the geographical imagination of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam was
more powerfully determined by their coastlines and their frontiers, however
vaguely frontiers may have been defined, and by limited bilateral relations with
some but not all neighbouring states. In the case of Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and
other societies it was also determined by a sense of their essential difference from
China. This was true of the state that occupied the northern part of what is now
Vietnam, which had minimal direct relationships with other East Asian or
South-east Asian states apart from China, and yet knew where its borders with
China lay, guarded them well, and located its identity in its ‘southern-ness’ with
respect to China.5 It was true of Korea, which had a close relationship with China
and a tenuous one with Japan, and which identified itself by referring to its ‘eastern-
ness’ with respect to China. And it was also true of Japan, which maintained limited
relations with Korea, with the Ryūkyū kingdom to the south and, from the seven-
teenth century, with the Dutch East India Company based in Nagasaki. Japan
maintained occasional diplomatic relations with China from the seventh to the
ninth centuries and from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, but thereafter
had no official relations with China until the late nineteenth century and did not
identify itself by its position vis-à-vis China.
In the case of Japan and Korea, their ‘geobodies’, to borrow Thongchai
Winichakul’s useful term, were represented in domestic maps from early on, perhaps
as a consequence of the natural maritime boundaries that they enjoyed.6 These
representations formed an abiding expression of a separate geographical and terri-
torial identity. In Vietnam, which shared a long and, at times, fractious border
with China, it was periods of warfare with China that generated a conception of
difference and territorial integrity. Thus, in the late eleventh century, when
Vietnamese soldiers faced an invading Chinese army, the Vietnamese general Lý
Thường Kiệt (1019–1105) is said to have composed the following poem, referring
to his ruler as the ‘Southern emperor’:
The Southern emperor rules the southern land.
Our destiny is writ in Heaven’s book.
How dare you bandits trespass on our soil?
You shall meet your undoing at our hands.7
‘Southern’ was how Vietnamese defined themselves vis-à-vis China, but the claim
that their ruler was an ‘emperor’, using a term normally reserved for the Chinese
emperor, made this a much more assertive statement.8
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when ships from Europe and
America became an ever more visible presence in East Asian waters, a growing per-
ception of threat from distant parts of the world brought with it a heightened sense
5 Whitmore 1994; Wolters 1982. To the south the frontiers of Vietnam were not defined by
g eographical features and they were gradually extended southwards: see also Anderson 2007 and the
essays in Lafont 1989.
6 Winichakul 1994; Unno 1994; Lee Chan 2005.
7 Huỳnh 1979, 7; Anderson 2007, 141–3.
8 Lý Thường Kiệt used the term nam đ ế (‘southern emperor’; Ch. nan di); the formal Chinese term
for emperor, huangdi, also appears frequently in Vietnamese chronicles.
of geography. Nevertheless, there was no sense of regional solidarity in the face of

the common threat. On the contrary, when the Japanese scholar and strategist
Hayashi Shihei (1738–1793) wrote his Illustrated account of the three kingdoms
(Sangoku tsūran zusetsu), he was thinking of Korea, the Ryūkyū kingdom, and the
northern region called Ezo as vulnerable points for Japan’s security, not as potential
allies (see Figure I.1).
China itself was a rather different case, maintaining relations with several far-flung
states, including Russia from the late seventeenth century onwards, but showing
little interest in any of them or in developing a sense of its own geobody. Perhaps
this was a result of the fragmentation that came with dynastic change, and perhaps
also because it lacked the natural boundaries enjoyed by the peninsular and insular
states. To the extent that there was a regional consciousness in China, it was not
one of neutral regional geography, but of a Sinocentric political geography that
conceived of relations with other states in terms of hierarchy and at least token
submission. Thus, the language of the Chinese dynastic histories is one of tribute
and submission when they mention other states. John Fairbank’s conceptualization
of these relationships as the ‘Chinese world order’ needs some modification now,
for the diplomatic niceties often masked deep ambivalences in the supposedly
Figure I.1. Map of Japan showing connections with Korea and the Ryūkyū kingdom to the
south, from an early nineteenth-century manuscript copy of Hayashi Shihei’s Illustrated
account of the three kingdoms (Sangoku tsūran zusetsu). National Archives of Japan.
Introduction 5
submissive tributary states; what is more, the language of Chinese universalism

was sometimes a poor reflection of the political and economic realities.9
Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the system of tributary relationships obstructed
the formation of any sense of a regional identity, let alone solidarity in the face of
threats. This is particularly evident from the perspective of Korea, where at least
in public a sense of subservience towards China seems to have persisted until the
end of the nineteenth century: Korea assiduously maintained its tributary rela-
tionship with first the Ming court and then with the Qing, while nurturing a
sense of aloof superiority towards Japan and Ryūkyū, and sometimes towards the
Manchu rulers of Qing China.10
In these circumstances, transnational geography could make few inroads in East
Asia until the twentieth century. The first attempt to create such a regional identity
was the revision of the concepts of the ‘Eastern Ocean’ (usually translated as
‘Orient’) and the ‘Western Ocean’ (i.e., the Occident) so as to apply to the geopol-
itical world of the nineteenth century.11 The territorial coverage of these terms was
not spelled out, but they divided the globe, and the ‘Orient’ covered what we think
of as East Asia. What started out as a binary geographical opposition, however,
rapidly became in the twentieth century a question of values and ideology, and as
such was subject to extensive elaboration and argumentation, particularly when
Japanese sinologists presented Japan as the cultural core of the ‘Orient’. Not sur-
prisingly, this take on the word met with some opposition in Korea and elsewhere.
The term is now used mostly as a translation for ‘Orient’ in the titles of institutions
and journals founded long ago; on the other hand, its counterpart, the ‘Occident’,
is now the standard word for ‘the West’ in Japan and Korea.12
If there was nothing in pre-modern East Asia corresponding to a regional
identity embodied in the language of transnational geography, there was, neverthe-
less, a terminology for conceptualizing relationships between East Asian societies.
This was the Chinese discourse summed up as hua-yi, ‘efflorescence and barbar-
ians’: the first referred to China as a cultured society and the second to all the
neighbouring states which were perceived not to enjoy those cultural advantages.
The roots of this discourse can be traced back well over two thousand years, to a
passage in the Book of rites concerning the peoples of the ‘five directions’—that is,
the centre and the four points of the compass.13 China was in the centre, and there
were different Chinese names for the ‘barbarians’ in each of the four directions;
those in the east were termed ‘Eastern barbarians’ (dong yi), and the chapter
devoted to them in the History of the later Han dynasty (early fifth century) describes
9 Fairbank 1968; Perdue 2003, 66–7; Perdue 2010; Tao 1983. Wang Gungwu described relations
between Song China and the Khitans after 1005 as ‘the nearest thing to equality in Chinese history
until modern times’: Wang Gungwu 1983, 55. On relations with Russia, which also did not fit the
mould, see Mancall 1971.
10 Kim Key-Hiuk 1980, 1–15; on Korea’s uneasy relationship with Japan during this period, see
ibid.,15–38. For examples of disdain towards Ryūkyū and Japan, see Peter Lee 1989, 81, 139–40, 175.
11 For the earlier signification of these terms see Miyazaki 1942.
12 Breuker 2005; Stefan Tanaka 1993, 4–5, 207–9, and passim.
13 Legge 1885, 1: 229. See also Rabut 2010 and, for the early history of the discourse, Müller 1980.

the kingdom of Koguryŏ in the northern part of the Korean peninsula and in
addition an early Japanese state.14 Thus the discourse that disparaged peripheral
states was already well established when China first came into contact with nascent
states beyond its borders.
The discourse of hua-yi has close parallels with the polarized concepts of
Hellene and barbarian that figured so prominently in Greek theatre in the fifth
century bce, and it similarly reflects a subjective definition of ethnicity and a
heightened consciousness of linguistic, political, and other differences.15 In Greece,
this discourse was exclusively for domestic consumption, but in East Asia it could
not but intrude upon the awareness of other peoples once they got hold of
Chinese texts that incorporated the discourse of hua-yi. Since it was unapologetically
Sinocentric, it had uncomfortable implications for the neighbouring states, which
found themselves located conceptually on the margins. None of them customarily
referred to themselves as ‘Eastern barbarians’, and to that extent they resisted the
discourse. Nevertheless, the term ‘Eastern barbarians’ provided the rubric for
descriptions of the Japanese and Korean states in Chinese dynastic histories up to
and including the New history of the Tang dynasty, which was completed in the elev-
enth century; in subsequent dynastic histories the rubric changed to ‘Foreign
countries’.16 This was probably partly because the rise of the powerful Khitan
empire (Liao dynasty) to the north made it politic to refine the discourse so as to
accommodate the amour propre of potential allies: when the Chinese court asked
the king of Korea for help to overpower the Khitans in 986, it did so with an
appeal to the common culture shared by Korea and Song China and to the need to
eradicate barbarism, thus incorporating the flattering implication that Korea was
not a ‘barbarian’ state.17
The change of terminology in the dynastic histories does not mean, however,
that the discourse went out of use. The founder of the Ming dynasty reminded
Korea in the fifteenth century that it came under the category of ‘Eastern barbar-
ians’.18 And ‘barbarian’ as a term denoting the ‘foreign’ appeared, for example, in
the titles of late-Ming works such as the Extensive account of the four barbarians
(Siyi guang ji, c. 1604). It also appeared in the ‘Chinese-barbarian glossaries’
(Hua-yi yi yu), the collective title of the bilingual glossaries produced by the
College of Foreign Languages (Siyiguan); the College’s name itself literally means
‘Institute for [the study of ] the barbarians of the four directions’.19 As late as 1841,
a Vietnamese envoy named Lý Văn Phức (1785–1849) arrived at his lodgings
in Beijing only to find that Chinese officials had written on the wall in large
characters 越夷會館 (hostel for the Vietnamese barbarians). Outraged, he refused
to enter, and demanded that the offending character 夷 (barbarian) be removed.
When his request was complied with, he finally deigned to enter the hostel, but he
recorded his feelings in a note, in which he claimed that Vietnam pertained to the
14 Hou han shu ch. 85. The part relating to Japan is translated in Tsunoda & Goodrich 1951, 1–3.
15 See Hall 1989, 1–13, 60–2.
16 Xin tang shu ch. 220; Song shi chs 487 & 491; Tsunoda & Goodrich 1951; Peter Lee 1993–6, 1:
7–24; Wilkinson 2015, 350–5.
17 Wang Gungwu 1983, 53. 18 Sun Weiguo 2012, 221–2. 19 Pelliot 1948, 207–90.
Introduction 7
‘efflorescence’ (hua) and not to the ‘barbarian’. This was because, he argued,
Vietnam took Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi as its teachers in the Learning of
the Way (i.e., Confucianism), and its administrative system was based on those of
the Zhou, Han, Tang, and Song dynasties of China. So how could Vietnam be a
barbarian state?20
On occasion, Korean intellectuals frankly acknowledged their status as ‘barbar-
ians’. Yi Dŏngmu (1741–1793), for example, wrote to a friend at the end of the
eighteenth century:
A look at the biographies of the outer barbarians in the Chinese historical texts reveals
that Chosŏn [Korea] is regarded as the best, followed by Vietnam and then Ryūkyū.
Similarly, Hong Taeyong (1731–1783) wrote:
The reason we are the Eastern barbarians is because of the geographical boundary.
Why do we try to conceal this? . . . For a long time, we have admired China and forgotten
that we are barbarians. Even though we imitate China, we ourselves are still essentially
barbarians.21
Acceptance of ‘barbarian’ status was much rarer in Japan, but Kumazawa Banzan
referred to himself as an ‘Eastern barbarian’ and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) described
himself as an ‘Eastern barbarian of the country of Japan’.22 In general, however,
there was resistance to the hua-yi discourse in Japan, and there were even attempts
from the seventeenth century onwards to reconfigure it with Japan replacing China
as the ‘central efflorescence’.23
The two most important features of the discourse which pitted the ‘central
efflorescence’ against the barbarians of the four points of the compass are, for our
purposes, its binary optic, dividing the world hierarchically into a centre and a
periphery, and the fact that it had nothing whatsoever to say about how those
peripheral states might interact with each other. It did not, therefore, provide or
embody any sense of regional consciousness corresponding to ‘East Asia’ and did
no more than conceptualize inter-state relationships from an exclusively Chinese
perspective. The results of such a conceptualization are clear, for example, in the
political slogan of the Koryŏ and Chosŏn dynasties in Korea, ‘serve the great and
maintain good relations with neighbours’ (sadae kyorin). The ‘great’ stood for
China in a tactful recognition of geographical and political realities, while the
‘neighbours’ were mainly Japan and Ryūkyū.
There was, at least in theory, another term that could have served to denote a
much broader geographical concept. That was the notion of ‘[all that is] under the
heavens’ (Ch. tianxia), which was used throughout the parts of East Asia that used
Chinese characters. In China itself, it connoted the world under the dominion of
the emperor, including the tributary states. Elsewhere, however, its use was narrower,
20 Quốc s ử dị biên, 346; Holcombe 2001, 41.

21 Quoted in Cho Sung-san 2015, 42 (adapted), and Sun Weiguo 2012, 223; see also Sun
Weiguo 2012, 225–6; Chŏng Okcha 1998, 187–9, 203, 220–8.
22 Kōkyō shōkai, 1; Nakai 1980, 167.
23 On Japanese resistance to hua-yi ideas, see Nakai 1980, 181–7; Tucker 1995.
being employed in each society to refer mostly or exclusively to that society alone.
Thus, any global significance it might have had was rarely realized in practice. In
Korea, for example, its use can be traced back to a fifth-century tomb inscription
in which the global significance is overlaid with local connotations.24 In Japanese
usage, it uncompromisingly denoted Japan, as in an inscription incised on a fifth-
century sword. In the late sixteenth century, it was the warlord Oda Nobunaga’s
word for the territories he controlled, and in the early seventeenth century, when
shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu sought to bring the books of ‘under the heavens’ under
his control, he was referring to books that were to be found in Japan.25
The potential of ‘under the heavens’ as a wider concept was not, however, com-
pletely overridden by local usages. In 1766 Hong Taeyong, a Korean envoy returning
from Beijing, visited a school in Shenyang in the Manchu homeland and aston-
ished the Manchu pupils with his ability, unusual in a Korean scholar, to read the
Classic of poetry and Mencius aloud in Chinese pronunciation. When they asked if
such texts were to be found in Korea, he reminded them of a passage in the Doctrine
of the mean which declares that ‘all under the heavens use the same writing’.26 In
making this reference, he was clearly representing Korea as a constituent part of the
Chinese world of writing. There is added piquancy from the fact that this took
place in the Manchu-speaking heartlands, where the Manchus, too, had for more
than a century been acquiring sinological polish and were similarly claiming to be
part of the Chinese world of writing.
There was, therefore, no term embracing the region that we identify by the
name East Asia, nor is it possible to identify the elements of a regional conscious-
ness avant la lettre. In that sense, the East Asia of this book is an entirely artificial
construct, however useful it may be.
What is worse, the word ‘Asia’ itself has for long been implicated in Othering
discourses, often derogatory; this process began in ancient Greece, and then in the
nineteenth century spread to Asia itself. In early-modern Europe it began with
Montesquieu (1689–1755), who in The Spirit of the Laws, considered that the
geography and climate of Asia explained why ‘despotism’ flourished there.
Montesquieu constructed Asia negatively as a countertype to Europe, and this
binary vision recurs in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and in the writings of
Hegel and Marx, who put forward the notion of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’
in the 1850s. This line was later taken over by Lenin and other Russian revolution-
aries, whose idea of Asia lay within a discursive structure that equated Europe with
nations and Asia with states belonging to the empires of European nations.27
24 Noh 2014, 283–311.

25 Saitama 1979, 12, 16; Lurie 2011, 92–4; Lamers 2000, 54, 70–1; Kornicki 2008.
26 In Legge’s translation the passage reads, ‘Now, over the kingdom, carriages have all wheels of the
same size; all writing is with the same characters; and for conduct there are the same rules’ (Legge 1893,
424). However, by translating tianxia as ‘kingdom’, Legge makes the term more restrictive than Hong
Taeyong understood it. For the passage in Hong Taeyong’s diary, see Yu 2003, 216–17, 223, and
Tamho ̆nso ̆, 270.
27 Sawer 1977, 22–39 and passim. On East Asian responses to Marx’s notion of the ‘Asiatic mode
of production’ see Fogel 1995, ch. 3.
Introduction 9
Meanwhile, in East Asia itself, ‘Asia’ was acquiring quite different nuances. In
1876, in a conversation with the statesman Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), the
Japanese ambassador to China, Mori Arinori (1847–1881), stated that he considered
himself to be ‘Asian’ but he noted that Asia would be unable to compete with
Europe until it had overcome the backwardness revealed by the contempt for
women’s intelligence that was the norm in Asia.28 For Mori, ‘Asia’ connoted
backwardness. Taking the argument further, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901), the
advocate of westernization in Japan, wanted nothing more to do with Asia if it
meant associating Japan with backwardness. In 1885 he argued in a short essay
that Japan had already ‘transcended Asian conservatism and moved towards
Western civilization’. This essay, entitled ‘On casting off Asia’, astutely recognized
that Asia had become much more than a geographical label.29 It had, of course,
long been so.
A different perspective was adopted by the Japanese pan-Asianists, such as Tarui
Tōkichi (1850–1922) and Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913). They were partly
inspired by the two Bengalis, Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore, who visited
Japan in 1893 and 1916 respectively, and in Okakura’s case by his sojourn in India
in 1900–1901. Together they reinvented ‘Asia’ as an embodiment of positive values
which they opposed to those of the ‘West’.30 These ideas found support elsewhere,
for example with Phan Bội Châu, who was one of the leaders of the Vietnamese
independence movement that sought an end to the French colonial presence and
who imagined China as the centre of a revived and independent Asia. And Sun
Yat-sen, in his famous speech on ‘Great Asianism’ in Kobe in 1924, argued that
Japan, which had defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, would lead
Asia in resistance to the European powers.31 Japanese pan-Asianism later gave
birth to the idea of an East Asian Community, which was first put forward in 1937
by the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, and then publicly proclaimed in 1938 by Prime
Minister Konoe.32 These ideas mutated into the notion of the ‘Great East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere’, as Japan’s imperial project for the region was termed in
1940. This was based on the acceptance of a division between the West and Asia,
and on an acknowledgement of Japan’s identification with Asia, but in such a
way that put Japan ahead of other Asian nations. Thus the Buddhist scholar
Takakusu Junjirō wrote in 1940 that Buddhism was more fully developed in
Japan than in China or India, and Confucianism more fully developed in Japan
than in China or Korea.33
For Koreans at the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of Asia served a
different purpose. It was introduced into textbooks in the interests of neutralizing
the political geography that favoured China, or, as Andre Schmid has put it, of
‘decentering the middle kingdom’. Thus, in a textbook issued in 1895, the statement
that China was, like Korea, ‘one country in the Asian continent’, was much more
28 Jansen 1992, 106, 116–18; Ōkubo 1972, 1: 164. 29 Miwa 1968.

30 Aydin 2007; Hay 1970; Hashikawa 1980; Sun Ge 2000.
31 Sinh & Wickenden 1999, 201–3; Jansen 1954, 210–12.
32 Morris-Suzuki 1998, 100–1. 33 Hotta 2007; Aydin 2007; Morris-Suzuki 1998, 170–1.
than just a geographical statement: ‘Asia’ provided Koreans for the first time with
a rhetorical tool for asserting Korea’s independence of, and equality with, China.34
Later, after 1910, when Korea was absorbed by Japan, the mix of East Asian
rhetoric and colonial realities made ‘East Asia’ a problematic discourse for Korean
intellectuals, who were all too well aware of the significance it was acquiring as a
tool of Japanese imperialism.35
In China itself, in a similar way, acceptance of the idea that China was part of
Asia or East Asia was an equally radical step. When Zeng Pu published a novel in
1894 using the pseudonym the Sick Man of East Asia (Dong ya bing fu) he was
not only accepting the new geography but was also claiming anything but a
leading role for China. Similarly, when the teacher and poet Lü Bicheng wrote in
the early twentieth century of ‘Dong Ya’ (East Asia), she was doing so in a spirit of
cosmopolitanism which resisted nationalist discourses and implicitly reduced
China to one country among many.36
Now, in the early twenty-first century, in Europe, North America, and the
English-speaking world at large, ‘East Asia’ has acquired common currency, and
some universities as a result have created departments of ‘East Asian Studies’ which
have subsumed under one head the study of China, Japan, and Korea. Gilbert
Rozman has provided the most influential justification for examining East Asia as
a region with a separate identity, based largely on the notion of a shared Confucian
past. However, Rozman’s argument that Vietnam is only tenuously connected with
East Asia is indefensible, even though it has been perpetuated in the academy
by the location of Vietnamese studies in departments of ‘South-east Asian Studies’
and in journals and books devoted to the same area.37 The problem, of course,
is that the historical Vietnam which I shall be dealing with in this book was
concentrated in the north, while the Cham state in the south had more cultural
connections with Cambodia and the rest of South-east Asia than with Vietnam.
This is no excuse, however, for supposing that the northern part was not integrated
politically and culturally into the networks treated in this book, and this historical
dimension to the study of Vietnam has been increasingly recognized in recent
studies of Confucianism and of modes of reading Chinese texts in East Asia.38
Defining the limits of pre-modern East Asia is surely, therefore, a fruitless exer-
cise, especially since the very concept was alien to the region. Common-sense
notions of where the limits of East Asia are to be drawn are equally unsatisfactory
if based on the geopolitical intricacies of any age, let alone our own, so I do not
propose to be bound by them in this book. Rather, the geographical limits need to
be historically valid, and that means, apart from anything else, bringing within our
conspectus states that do not now exist and cultural links that reach well beyond
East Asia. After all, the second-century Roman emperor Antoninus Pius is mentioned
in the History of the later Han dynasty, showing that cultural knowledge was already
34 Schmid 2002, 55. 35 Kim Keongil 2010, 107–13.

36 Fong 2004, 20, 22, 54; Duara 2010, 970–1.
37 Rozman 1991. The concept of ‘South-east Asia’ dates back only to 1943 when the Allies estab-
lished the South East Asia Command.
38 See, for example, the coverage of Elman, Duncan, & Ooms 2002 and Woodside 2006.
Introduction 11
linking even Europe and China, albeit indirectly.39 A recent study by Charles
Holcombe sees the role of literary Chinese as decisive for conceptualizing East
Asia. Consequently, in his account of the ‘genesis of East Asia’, Holcombe brings
within his range of vision not only Vietnam but also Tibet and other societies, to
the extent that they engaged with Chinese culture, and this is what I shall be doing
in this book.40
One reason for doing so is that the political geography of the East Asian region
underwent many changes before the modern configuration of nation states became
established. Even the modern configuration itself has undergone numerous changes
during the twentieth century as the Japanese colonial empire and then the People’s
Republic of China redrew the political boundaries. The borders are still unsettled,
as is all too apparent from continuing sovereignty disputes over the Paracel islands
to the east of Vietnam, over the Spratly islands in the South China Sea, over the
Senkaku/Diaoyu islands located between Japan and Taiwan, over the island of
Tokto/Takeshima to the east of Korea, and over the so-called Northern Territories,
a group of islands lying between Japanese Hokkaido and the Russian Kurile islands,
and that is to say nothing of the divided Korean peninsula.
In the more distant past, there were numerous states that flourished and then
disappeared in East Asia, akin to the ‘vanished kingdoms’ of Europe. These states
have been briefly described at the beginning of this book: some of them were
short-lived, while others survived as late as the nineteenth century. They were all
to a greater or lesser extent in contact with at least some of the East Asian states
that have survived to the present. They encountered Chinese writing and Chinese
texts just as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam did, and sometimes they dealt with them
very differently, thus providing a valuable counterpoint to the reading strategies
used in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. They will, therefore, be mentioned frequently
in this book.
Ch i n a a n d i t s N e i gh b o urs
To denote the East Asian nation states of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, I have
so far been using their modern English names without comment, but each of
these societies had their own terms to refer to themselves and to China. These terms
are important, because they are revealing of attitudes and identity, and because
changing usages reflect growing cultural self-confidence. In particular, it was no
easy matter for neighbouring societies to decide how to refer to China, the largest
and most powerful state in the region. The choices they made had an important
impact on how they conceived of their own societies, and again reflect their
perceptions of cultural relations in East Asia. For these reasons, it is necessary to
39 Hill 2009. For a study of early East Asia based on a similarly inclusive approach and taking full
account of long-distance connections, see Holcombe 1999.
40 Holcombe 2001, 61 and passim. See also Elman 2002.
address this issue of names, for it is closely connected to one of the themes of this
book, the ascendance of vernacular polities on the periphery of China.41
For China itself, one possibility for outsiders was to use terms of Chinese origin
like ‘Central efflorescence’ (Zhonghua) or ‘Central country’ (Zhongguo, which
used to be rendered in English as ‘Middle kingdom’). The second of these is, in its
local pronunciations, the common and official term for China today throughout
East Asia (thus Chūgoku in Japan, Chungguk in Korea, and Trung Quốc in
Vietnam). In the West, however, the standard terms for China have other origins:
the Russian Kitai derives from the Khitan empire, as does the word Cathay, which
was used by writers such as William of Rubruck, Ibn Battuta, and Marco Polo,
while the word China itself derives from the Sanskrit Cīna, which in turn is
thought to be derived from the name of the Qin dynasty (221–206 bce).42
However, Sinocentric terms such as ‘Central efflorescence’ or ‘Central country’
naturally left surrounding societies in the shade, so they tended to avoid these
terms and resorted instead to the name of the current Chinese dynasty, as indeed
Chinese did themselves. Thus Japanese locutions such as ‘entering Tang’ (nittō)
and ‘entering Ming’ (nyūmin) meant ‘going to China’, making metonymic use of
the names of the dynasties so as to avoid any reference to the ‘Central country’.
Indeed, in all the societies discussed in this book, the characters that represented
the names of the Han and Tang dynasties metonymously referred to China both
during and long after the dynasties had been replaced. Similarly, ‘Chinese charac-
ters’ are known in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, as ‘Han characters’ (V. chữ han,
K. hanja, J. kanji), a term which has never been much used in China. In the same
way, poetry and prose writing in literary Chinese are known as ‘Han poetry’ and
‘Han writing’ respectively.43
This by no means exhausts the terms used to denote China. In Japan, in particular,
there were many others, some of which seem to have fulfilled the role of neutral
substitutes not only for ‘Central country’ but also for the dynasty names.44 ‘Kara’,
for example, appears to be an ancient term denoting the ‘foreign’, but it was
used in the Tale of Genji and in later texts to mean ‘China’.45 Terms such as kano
kuni (‘that country’), as used by Motoori Norinaga in the eighteenth century
and others after him, were deliberately lacking in respect, as was Ogyū Sorai’s
41 The recent collection of essays entitled Sinographies: writing China regrettably fails to specify that
the authors are only concerned with how China was imagined and textually constructed in the West:
Hayot et al. 2008. A comprehensive study of how China was imagined and textually constructed in East
Asia is sorely needed; for separate studies in English see Woodside 1988, Pollack 1986, Jansen 1992,
and Kim Hey-Kiuk 1980.
42 Wade 2009, 6–13; Fogel 1989.
43 The Chinese equivalent of ‘Han characters’ is not completely unknown in Chinese sources. See
for example the late Ming writer Yan Congjian’s use of it when describing writing practices in Vietnam:
Shuyu zhouzi lu, 237. However, most of these words have only come into their own in Japan, Korea,
and Vietnam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the Chinese words for ‘poetry’ and
‘writing’ were coopted to stand not for Chinese poetry and writing any more but for their vernacular
equivalents, necessitating new words to identify Chinese poetry and writing.
44 See Fogel 1995, 67.
45 ‘Morokoshi’ derives from the Japanese conventional readings of two characters meaning ‘the
many Yue’ (Ch. Zhuyue).
Introduction 13
refusal to use the ‘Great’ in the Chinese terms ‘Great Ming’ and ‘Great Qing’ for
the ruling dynasties.46
Towards the end of the Edo period this tendency was taken further by writers
familiar with Western words for ‘China’, including Ōkuni Takamasa (1792–1871),
a nationalist thinker well informed about the West and with an interest in inter-
national law. In order to indicate that to him China was just a country like any
other, he used ‘Shina’ 支那, a term that was first used in Japan in the ninth century
but in Ōkuni’s writings probably also reflected his knowledge of the word ‘China’
in Dutch pronunciation. This term was in wide use in Japan until the end of the
Second World War but has fallen out of use, for it has been perceived as deroga-
tory. Stefan Tanaka has argued that Shina ‘signified China as a troubled place
mired in its past, in contrast to Japan, a modern Asian nation’, but this interpret-
ation is difficult to substantiate, particularly since it was also in use in China earlier
in the twentieth century.47 The Korean equivalent of Shina, written with the same
characters, was also in use from the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, a primary
school textbook in 1906 declared that, ‘The great empire of Korea is to the east of
the Asian continent, it faces the sea to the east, west and south, and to the north is
contiguous with China’, deliberately avoiding other terms for China that might
have been felt to put Korea in the shade.48
In all the societies on the periphery of China various terms were in use to refer
to their own polities, and these differ from their modern names. These usages were
not always conceived in reference to China, although they were of course written
in Chinese characters, and they did not always coincide with the names for those
societies that were officially in use in the Chinese dynastic histories. In Vietnam, it
was customary to refer to China as ‘the North’ and thus to their own society as ‘the
South’. In 679 the Tang court established a frontier outpost in what is now Vietnam
and used the name An Nan. This is familiar in the West in the Vietnamese form
Annam and means ‘pacified south’ or ‘secure south’, thus reflecting a Chinese per-
spective.49 More self-assertive locutions on the Vietnamese side, used for example
in the titles of Vietnamese dynastic histories but not in diplomatic correspondence
with China, include Đại Việt (‘Great Viet’), a term which appropriated the ‘Yue’
to refer to Vietnam itself and was adopted in 1428 as the official name of the state.
In the previous year, 1427, the Ming armies had been defeated and expelled from
Vietnamese territory, and from that time onwards An Nan (Annam) became the
standard term for Vietnam in China, somewhat ironically given that Vietnam was
no longer ‘pacified’ or ‘secure’. In 1802, the newly founded Nguyễn dynasty came
to a compromise agreement with the Chinese court whereby the officially recog-
nized name would henceforward be Việt Nam. However, China continued to refer
to it as An Nan while in Vietnam itself a new name Đại Nam (‘Great south’), was
arbitrarily adopted in 1838. In the late nineteenth century the French colonial
46 Nakai 1980, 182. For Motoori on the names for China and Japan, see his Gyojū gaigen, 67–9,
and Kokugōkō.
47 On Ōkuni, Harootunian 1980, 35–6; on Shina, Stefan Tanaka 1993, 3–9 (quotation from p. 4)
and passim; Fogel 1995, ch. 4; Fogel 2012.
48 Ch’odŭng sohak, 144. 49 Bửu 1969, 9–10, 71.
authorities divided Vietnam into three parts, one of which they called Annam.50
It was only in the 1930s that Ho Chi Minh and other nationalists rejected the
name ‘Annam’, and in 1945 they also discarded the French name Indo-Chine, with
its vision of a united Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, in favour of ‘Việt Nam’.51
In the case of Korea, the names used by the early states of Koguryŏ, Paekche,
and Silla, and by the Koryŏ dynasty, coincide with those used in the Chinese dyn-
astic histories. Other usages focused on Korea’s position to the east of China, such
as Haedong (‘East of the sea’), Tongguk (‘Eastern country’), and Taedong (‘Great
East’), and these were often to be found in the titles of books exalting Korea. From
1392 onwards Koreans also referred to their land as Chosŏn (‘Morning calm’): it
was adopted as the name of the new dynasty which ruled Korea from 1392 to 1910
and is still used to denote that period in Korean history. Currently, however, it is
employed in the official name of North Korea, while South Korea calls itself
Han’guk (‘the country of the Han people’). A more remarkable term used for
Korea is ‘Little central efflorescence’ (K. Sojunghwa; Ch. Xiao zhonghua), which
was a diminutive version of a term used exclusively to denote China, the ‘central
efflorescence’. According to a Korean moral primer by Pak Semu (1487–1564)
published in 1682, this term was used by Chinese to refer to Korea in recognition
of its conformity with Chinese practices and culture.52 While acknowledging
Korea’s inferiority to China, it placed Korea at the centre of the East Asian world,
and the fact that it was subsequently used in Korea is indicative of a close identifi-
cation with China that was unmatched elsewhere in East Asia. Much later, at the
end of the nineteenth century, the term Taehan Cheguk (‘The empire of great
Korea’) was adopted to raise the standing of Korea vis-à-vis China and Japan; this
usage naturally came to an end in 1910 when Korea was annexed by Japan and
became a part of the Japanese empire.
Japan appears under the name Wo 倭 in the fifth-century History of the later
Han dynasty, which also includes a reference to ‘Yamato’, the name of an early
state in the Japanese islands.53 From the seventh century if not earlier, Japanese
used the name Nihon (‘Source of the sun’) to denote their land, which occasioned
some displeasure in the Chinese dynastic histories because it was interpreted as
either deliberately or accidentally disrespectful; nevertheless, it was accepted in
China and appeared in the Old history of the Tang dynasty and later Chinese dynastic
histories.54 Another common usage was Honchō (‘This court/country’), which
50 Goscha 1996, 93–8; Davidson 1975, 299; Dutton, Werner & Whitmore 2012, 258–60;
Baldanza 2016, 1–5.
51 Goscha 1996. Not without some regret, for Ho Chi Minh had at first taken over the idea of a
united Indochina under Vietnamese control. For other names used for China and Vietnam by
Vietnamese, see Kelley 2005, 25–6 and Baldanza 2016, 1–5. Bửu 1969 is a thorough study of all the
names used for Vietnam with extensive quotation from Chinese and Vietnamese chronicles; on the
use of Đại Nam, see 118–20.
52 Tongmong sŏnsŭp oe, 89. The term appears in the Annals of the Chosŏn dynasty: see, e.g., CWS
Sŏngjong 12[1481].10.17, 18[1487].10.12, etc. On Sohwa, see E. H. Kang 1998, 258–60.
53 The exact location of Yamato is a very vexed question: see Kidder 2007.
54 This word can also be pronounced Nippon, a variant which has been seen as more assertive if not
nationalist; it appears on Japanese postage stamps and banknotes and is used by politicians; the official
line is that both pronunciations are in common use.
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sinne tunkeutumaan? Teille se ei onnistunut, mutta se on aivan eri
asia, sillä helpompi on tukkia tie suurelta armeijalta kuin minun
joukkoni kaltaiselta, helposti piiloon pujahtavalta joukolta. Usein olen
ollut viidakossa piilossa ja Douglas on kulkenut aivan vierestäni ohi
mitään huomaamatta. Douglas lähtee varmasti seuraamaan teitä ja
jättää minulle tien vapaaksi.
— Olette, kuulemma, pitänyt häntä lujilla! — sanoi Wolodyjowski

tyytyväisenä.
— Niin, tuota lurjusta! — lisäsi Zagloba. — Hän kuuluu hikoilleen

niin, että muutti joka päivä paitaa. Te olette hoidellut häntä yhtä hyvin
kuin Chowanskia, ja minun täytyy sanoa, että en itsekään olisi tätä
paremmin tehnyt, vaikka jo herra Koniecpolski sanoi, että
sissisodassa ei kukaan vedä vertoja Zagloballe.
— Minusta näyttää mahdolliselta, — sanoi Wolodyjowski

Kmicicille, — että jos Douglas palaa takaisin, niin hän jättää
Boguslawin tänne sotimaan teitä vastaan.
— Suokoon Jumala sen! Itsekin olen sitä toivonut, — vastasi

Kmicic vilkkaasti. — Jos minä etsin häntä ja hän minua, niin kai me
löydämme toisemme. Kolmatta kertaa hän ei enää saane syöstyksi
minua satulasta, mutta jos hän sen tekee, niin en minä enää nouse
maasta. Muistan hyvin opettamanne temput ja kaikki lyönnit.
Harjoittelen joka päivä Sorokan kanssa, että käteni ei kangistuisi.
— Mitäpä sotajuonet toimittavatkaan! — huudahti Wolodyjowski.

— Sapeli, se on poikaa!
Tämä lausuma loukkasi hiukan Zaglobaa. Hän vastasi heti:

— Jokainen tuulimylly luulee, että pääasia on siivillä huiskiminen,
ja tiedättekö miksi, herra Michal? Koska sillä on akanoita katon alla,
toisin sanoen päässä. Sotataidon perusteena ovat sotajuonet,
muutenhan Roch Kowalski voisi olla suurhetmani ja te täysi
kenttämarsalkka.
— Mitä herra Kowalski hommailee? — kysyi Kmicic.
— Herra Kowalski? Nyt hänellä jo on rautakypärä päässä, ja

sehän on paikallaan, sillä pitäähän kaalinpään päällä olla padan
kansi. Hän kahmaisi paljon saalista Varsovasta ja on siirtynyt
ruhtinas Polubinskin husaarijoukkoon. Hän tulee joka päivä
luoksemme telttaan ja katselee syrjäsilmällä, näkyisikö jostakin
olkien seasta pullon kaula. En saa paranemaan tuota poikaa
juoppoudesta. Hyvä esimerkki ei vaikuta mitään. Olen hänelle
ennustanut, että hän saa vielä katua eroamistaan laudalaisesta
rykmentistä. Lurjus! Kiittämätön! Palkaksi monista hyvistä töistäni,
jotka olen häntä kohtaan tehnyt, hän on minut tuolla tavoin hylännyt.
— Te haukutte aina Kowalskia, — sanoi Wolodyjowski, — mutta

hän on kuitenkin silmäteränne.
— Pidän hänestä enemmän kuin teistä, herra Michal, koska en

milloinkaan ole voinut sietää rakastuneita narreja, jotka heti, kun
näkevät jonkin tytön hameen häilähtävän, alkavat kieppua kuin
väkkärä.
— Taikka niinkuin ne Kazanowskien apinat, joitten kanssa

taistelitte!
— Naurakaa, naurakaa, saatte ensikerralla itse valloittaa

Varsovan!
— Tekö muka sen valloititte?
— Kuka Krakovan portin expugnavit? Kuka sai toimeen, että

kenraalit otettiin vangiksi? Ne istuvat nyt vedellä ja leivällä
Zamośćiessa, ja kun Wittenberg katsoo Wrangeliin, niin hän sanoo:
"Zagloba on pannut meidät tänne!" — ja sitten he molemmat itkeä
vetistelevät. Jos herra Sapieha ei olisi sairas ja olisi täällä läsnä, min
hän sanoisi teille, kuka ensimmäisenä puisteli irti ruotsalaisen luteen
varsovalaisnahalta.
— Hyvät ystävät! — huudahti Kmicic. — Tehkää minulle se

palvelus, että lähetätte minulle tiedon tuosta taistelusta, joka on
tulossa Varsovan edustalla. Lasken sormillani öitä ja päiviä enkä saa
rauhaa, ennenkuin saan tietää jotakin varmaa.
Zagloba pani sormen otsalleen.
— Kuulkaa nyt minun politiikkaani, — sanoi hän, — sillä se, mitä

nyt sanon, toteutuu yhtä varmasti… kuin että tuo pikari seisoo
edessäni… Eikö se seiso?
— Kyllä, kyllä! Puhukaa!
— Tuossa päätaistelussa me joko joudumme tappiolle tahi

voitamme…
— Sen tietää jokainen! — keskeytti Wolodyjowski.
— Parempi olisi, että olisitte vaiti ja oppisitte, herra Michal!

Otaksukaamme, että joudumme tässä taistelussa tappiolle.
Tiedättekö, miten silloin käy? Kas, ettepä tiedäkään, sillä jopa
pyörittelette pikku viiksiänne kuin jänis. Mutta minäpä sanon teille: ei
käy mitenkään!
Kmicic, joka oli hyvin tulinen mies, nousi seisomaan, iski pikarinsa
pöytään ja huusi:
— Te puhelette pötyä!
— Sanon teille, että ei käy mitenkään! — lausui Zagloba. — Te

nuoret ette ymmärrä, että niinkuin asiat nyt ovat, kuninkaamme,
rakas isänmaamme, sotajoukkomme voivat joutua tappiolle
viidessäkymmenessä taistelussa perätysten… ja sota jatkuu vain
entiseen tapaan, aateli lähtee taisteluun, ja sen esimerkkiä
seuraavat alemmat säädyt… Jos yhdellä kertaa ei onnistuta, niin
onnistutaan toisella, tahi seuraavalla, siihen asti kunnes vihollinen
uupuu. Mutta kun ruotsalaiset joutuvat tappiolle yhdessäkin
suuremmassa taistelussa, niin piru heidät perii auttamattomasti ja
vaaliruhtinaan vielä kaupanpäällisiksi.
Zagloba innostui, tyhjensi pikarinsa, iski sen pöytään ja jatkoi:
— Kuunnelkaa nyt tarkoin, sillä ette te kenen suusta tahansa kuule

tämmöistä, koska kaikki eivät kykene näkemään suurpiirteisesti!
Moni ajattelee: mikä vielä tulee kohtaloksemme? Paljonko taisteluita,
paljonko tappioita, jommoisia Caroluksen kanssa sotiessa aina on
odotettavissa, paljonko kyyneleitä, verenvuodatusta ja
koettelemuksia tulee vielä osallemme? Ja moni on epätoivoissaan,
moni herjaa laupiasta Jumalaa ja Pyhää Neitsyttä… Mutta minä
sanon teille: tiedättekö, mikä odottaa noita vandaalimaisia
vihollisiamme? Tuho! Tiedättekö, mikä odottaa meitä? Voitto! Kenties
he lyövät meidät vielä sata kertaa… hyvä! Mutta me lyömme heidät
sadannella yhdennellä kerralla, ja silloin on juttu lopussa.
Tämän sanottuaan Zagloba sulki hetkeksi silmänsä, mutta avasi

ne sitten äkkiä, katsoi säihkyvin katsein eteensä ja huudahti äkkiä
täyttä kurkkua:
— Voitto! Voitto! Kmicic punastui riemusta.
— Jumal'auta, hän on oikeassa! Se siitä tulee lopuksi!
— Täytyy tunnustaa, että teillä on järkeä päässä! — sanoi

Wolodyjowski. — Vihollinen voi valloittaa Puolan, mutta ei pitää sitä
vallassaan, vaan loppujen lopuksi hänen on mentävä tiehensä.
— Ahaa, onko järkeä päässäni! — sanoi Zagloba ilostuneena

kehumisesta. — Koska niin on, niin ennustan teille vielä lisää…
Jumala auttaa oikeamielisiä! Te (hän kääntyi Kmicicin puoleen)
voitatte Radziwill-petturin, menette Taurogiin, vapautatte tytön, otatte
hänet vaimoksenne, saatte paljon lapsia… Kuivukoon kieleni, jos ei
käy niinkuin sanon… Herran tähden! Älkää kuristako minua
kuoliaaksi!
Varoitus oli paikallaan, sillä Kmicic oli ottanut Zagloban syliinsä,

kohottanut ilmaan ja alkanut häntä niin puristaa, että ukon silmät jo
mulkoilivat. Mutta tuskin hän oli päässyt taas jaloilleen ja vetänyt
hiukan henkeä, kun jo Wolodyjowski innostuneena tarttui hänen
käsivarteensa.
— Nyt on minun vuoroni! Sanokaa, mikä minua odottaa?
— Jumala siunaa teitä, herra Michal! Oma tylleröisenne lahjoittaa

teille koko parven… älkää pelätkö! — Uh!
— Vivat — huudahti Wolodyjowski.
— Mutta ensin teemme selvän ruotsalaisista!

— Teemme! Teemme! — huudahtivat molemmat nuoret everstit
kalistaen sapeleitaan.
— Vivat! Voitto!
KYMMENES LUKU.
Viikkoa myöhemmin saapui Kmicic vaaliruhtinaan Preussin rajalle

Rajgrodiiin. Hän oli päässyt sinne verraten helposti, sillä vahan
ennen hetmanin lähtöä hän oli painautunut metsiin ja ollut niin
piilossa, että Douglas luuli hänen tataarilaistensakin lähteneen koko
divisioonan mukana Varsovaan, minkä vuoksi hän oli jättänyt vain
vähäisiä joukkoja näitä seutuja suojelemaan.
Douglas itse lähti seuraamaan Gosiewskin jäljessä, ja hänen

mukanaan olivat Radziejowski ja Radziwill.
Kmicic sai tietää tästä jo ennenkuin meni rajan yli ja oli hyvin
harmissaan, kun ei saanut kohdata silmästä silmään verivihollistaan,
joka kenties saisi rangaistuksensa jonkun toisen kädestä,
luultavimmin Wolodyjowskin, joka niinikään oli vannonut kostavansa
hänelle.
Kun hän ei siis voinut kostaa petturille isänmaan kärsimiä

onnettomuuksia ja niitä vääryyksiä, jotka häntä itseään olivat
kohdanneet, min hän kohdisti kostonsa sitä kauheampana
vaaliruhtinaan alueisiin.
298
Jo samana yönä kuin tataarilaiset sivuuttivat rajapyykin, kajasti
taivas tulipaloista ja kuului sodan jalkoihin joutuneitten ihmisten
valitus. Ken osasi puolankielellä pyytää armahdusta, sai päällikön
käskystä armon, mutta saksalaiset uudisasutukset, siirtolat, kylät ja
kauppalat muuttuivat tuhkaläjiksi, ja kauhistuneet asukkaat joutuivat
miekan uhreiksi.
Ei öljy leviä niin nopeasti meren pinnalla, kun purjehtijat sitä

kaatavat siihen asetellakseen aaltoja, kuin levisi tataarilaisten ja
vapaaehtoisten joukko yli siihen asti rauhallisten ja turvallisten
seutujen. Oli kuin jokainen tataarilainen olisi osannut jakaantua
kahtia tahi kolmia ennättääkseen useampaan paikkaan yht'aikaa
polttamaan ja ryöstämään. Ei säästetty edes viljapeltoja eikä
puutarhojen puita.
Kmicic oli niin kauan hillinnyt tataarilaisiaan, että kun hän vihdoin
päästi ne valloilleen kuin petolinnut, niin he aivan hekumoivat
surmatessaan ja hävittäessään kaiken. Toinen pyrki olemaan
toistaan etevämpi, ja kun he eivät voineet ottaa vankeja, niin he
aamusta iltaan suorastaan uivat ihmisveressä.
Itse Kmicic, jonka sydämessä oli paljon viileyttä, päästi sen

täydellisesti valloilleen, ja vaikka häh itse ei tahrinut käsiään
aseettomien verellä, niin hän mielellään kuitenkin näki sen
virtailevan. Hänen mielensä oli rauhallinen, eikä omatunto häntä
soimannut, sillä tuohan oli muukalaisten ja lisäksi vielä kerettiläisten
verta. Luulipa hän vielä tekevänsä Jumalalle ja varsinkin Pyhälle
Neitsyelle otollisen teon.
Olihan vaaliruhtinas, tuo Puolan vasalli, joka eli Puolan armoilla,

ensimmäisenä nostanut kätensä hallitsijaansa vastaan. Hän oli siis
rangaistuksen ansainnut, ja Kmicic oli ainoastaan Jumalan vihan
välikappale.
Senvuoksi hän iltaisin rauhallisena sormieli rukousnauhaansa

palavien saksalaisten kylien tulen valossa, ja kun ahdistettujen
huudot sotkivat hänen laskunsa, aloitti hän alusta, jotta ei olisi
huolimaton hartaudenharjoituksessa.
Mutta ei vain vihaa ja murhanhimoa ollut hänen sydämessään,

vaan siinä liikkui hurskaitten tunteitten ohella muitakin, jotka liittyivät
entisaikain muistoihin. Usein johtui hänen mieleensä se aika, jolloin
hän ahdisti Chowanskia saaden siitä niin paljon kunniaa, ja hänen
entiset toverinsa astuivat ilmi elävinä hänen silmiensä eteen. Kaikki
ne kituivat nyt helvetissä, mutta jos ne nyt voisivat olla täällä, niin
saisivatpa ne kahlata veressä tekemättä syntiä ja olla valtakunnalle
hyödyksi!
Ja herra Andrzej huokasi ajatellessaan, miten turmiollista on

hillitön omavaltaisuus, se kun jo aikaisessa nuoruudessa sulkee tien
hyviin tekoihin ainaiseksi.
Enimmän hän kuitenkin muisteli Oleńkaa. Mitä syvemmälle

Preussiin hän tunkeutui, sitä enemmän kirveli sydämen haavoja,
aivan kuin ne tulipalot, jotka levisivät hänen ympärillään, myös
olisivat voimistuttaneet sydämen paloa. Joka päivä hän puhui
sydämessään tytölle:
— Kyyhkyläiseni armas, kenties olet minut jo unhottanut, tahi jos

minua muistat, niin vain viha täyttää sydämesi. Mutta kaukana ja
lähellä, yöllä ja päivällä, työssä isänmaan hyväksi ja vaarojen
keskellä minä aina ajattelen sinua, ja sieluni lentää luoksesi yli
metsien ja vuorten kuin lintu laskeutuakseen väsyneenä sinun
jalkoihisi. Isänmaan ja sinun tähtesi olen valmis vuodattamaan
kaiken vereni, mutta voi minua, jos ainaiseksi olet karkoittanut minut
sydämestäsi!
Näissä mietteissä hän kulki rajalinjaa yhä korkeammalle pohjoista

kohti, poltti ja hävitti ketään säästämättä. Ääretön ikävä valtasi
hänet. Hän olisi tahtonut jo seuraavana päivänä olla Taurogissa,
mutta edessä oli vielä pitkä ja vaikea matka, sillä kaikki kirkonkellot
Preussissa soivat hälyyttäen kansaa kokoon.
Ken kynnelle kykeni, tarttui aseihin kauheata vihollista vastaan.

Apujoukkoja tuli hyvin kaukaisiltakin seuduilta, renkipojistakin
muodostui taistelujoukkoja, ja pian oli jokaista tataarilaista kohti
kaksikymmentä talonpoikaa.
Kmicic iski noihin joukkoihin kuin salama, hakkasi maahan, hajoitti

ja hirtti, pujahti pois ja ilmestyi yht'äkkiä taas tulenliekkien
ympäröimänä, mutta ei voinut enää edetä yhtä nopeasti kuin ennen.
Usein täytyi hänen miehineen tataarilaiseen tapaan piileksiä
viikkokausia viidakoissa tahi järvenrantain kaislikoissa. Kansa ajoi
häntä kuin sutta, ja hän purikin kuin susi, mutta ei tyytynyt vain
puolustautumaan, vaan myös ahdisti.
Koska hän oli toimissaan perinpohjainen, niin hän saattoi viipyä

samalla seudulla niin kauan, kunnes se oli tyystin hävitetty tulella ja
miekalla usean penikulman laajuudelta. Jollakin tavoin oli väestö
saanut tietää hänen nimensä, ja sitä nyt mainitsivat peloissaan
kaikki, ja sen maine kulki Itämereen saakka.
Babinicz olisi kylläkin voinut taas palata Puolan alueelle ja

ruotsalaisista joukoista huolimatta rientää Taurogiin, mutta hän ei
tahtonut tehdä sitä, sillä hän tahtoi ennen kaikkea palvella —
isänmaata. Mutta tuli sanomia, jotka innostuttivat väestöä jatkamaan
puolustusta ja kostamaan, kun ne taas täyttivät Babiniczin sydämen
suurella surulla. Huhuttiin Varsovan luona tapahtuneen suuren
taistelun ja Puolan kuninkaan joutuneen siinä tappiolle. "Kaarle
Kustaa ja vaaliruhtinas ovat lyöneet kaikki Kasimirin joukot", sanottiin
Preussissa iloiten. "Varsova on uudelleen valloitettu, tämä on suurin
voitto koko sodassa, ja nyt on Puola lopullisesti mennyttä."
Kaikki, jotka saatiin, vangeiksi ja jotka tataarilaiset asettivat

hehkuville hiilille kuulustelussa, toistivat samaa. Liikkeellä oli, kuten
sodan aikana on tavallista, paljon liioiteltuja ja epävarmoja tietoja.
Muun muassa kerrottiin, että Jan Kasimirin armeija oli täydellisesti
tuhottu, hetmanit kaatuneet ja kuningas joutunut vangiksi.
Oliko kaikki siis lopussa? Uudelleen eloon herännyt ja voittoisa

Puola oli siis ollut vain harhanäky? Niin suuri voima, niin suuri
sotajoukko, niin monet suuret miehet ja kuuluisat soturit: hetmanit,
kuningas, Czarniecki voittamattomine divisioonineen, kaikki oli
mennyttä, kaikki oli haihtunut kuin savu. Tällä onnettomalla maalla ei
siis enää ollut muita puolustajia kuin yksityiset vapaaehtoiset joukot,
jotka saatuaan tiedon tappiosta varmaankin hajaantuvat kaikkiin
ilmansuuntiin.
Kmicic repi tukkaansa ja väänteli käsiään, otti käsiinsä kosteata

multaa ja painoi sitä polttavaa päätään vastaan.
— Minäkin kaadun, — sanoi hän itsekseen, — mutta sitä ennen

hukkuu tämä maa vereen!
Hän alkoi taistella epätoivon vimmalla, ei pysytellyt enää piilossa

viidakoissa ja metsissä, etsi kuolemaa, syöksyi kuin mielipuoli kolme
kertaa voimakkaampaa vihollisjoukkoa vastaan ja hajoitti sen. Hänen
tataarilaisistaan hävisivät viimeisetkin inhimilliset tunteet, ja he
muuttuivat laumaksi villipetoja. Nämä barbaarit, jotka olivat
taitavampia ryöstämään ja yllättämällä hyökkäämään kuin
suoriutumaan avoimessa taistelussa, olivat monissa taisteluissa nyt
kehittyneet sellaisiksi sotureiksi, että he kykenivät vastustamaan
maailman etevintä ratsuväkeä ja hajoittamaan ruotsalaisten
taalalaisjoukotkin. Kahakassa asestetun preussilaisen
talonpoikaisväestön kanssa tataarilaiset helposti voittivat kaksisataa
tahi kolmesataa raskasaseista, rotevaa, musketeilla varustettua
talonpoikaa.
Kmicic totutti heidät pois siitä tavasta, että he vastuksikseen

kokosivat saalista. He ottivat nyt vain rahaa, etupäässä kultaa, ja
ompelivat sen satulaansa. Kun joku heistä kaatui, niin toiset
taistelivat hurjasti saadakseen hänen hevosensa ja satulansa.
Kokoamalla vain tämmöistä rikkautta he eivät menettäneet kykyään
liikkua miltei yliluonnollisen nopeasti ja notkeasti. Huomattuaan, että
he eivät minkään muun johtajan johdolla voisi saada niin runsaita
saaliita, he kiintyivät Babinicziin ja seurasivat häntä kuin koirat
metsästäjää. Todellisella muhamettilaisella uskollisuudella he
taistelujen jälkeen luovuttivat Sorokalle ja Kiemliczeille suurimman
osan saaliista, joka oli tuleva päällikölle. — Allah! — puhui Akbah-
Ulan — Vähän heitä palaa takaisin Baktshi-Saraihin, mutta niistä,
jotka palaavat, tulee jokaisesta ruhtinas.
Babinicz, joka aina oli osannut koota sotasaalista, rikastui nyt

kovin.
Mutta kuolemaa, jota hän haki halukkaammin kuin kultaa, hän ei
löytänyt.
Kului taasen kuukausi uskomattomissa vaivoissa ja vaaroissa.
Vaikka hevoset olivat saaneet syödä hyviä kauroja Preussissa,
tarvitsivat ne kuitenkin edes parin päivän levähdyksen. Kmicic
vetäytyi senvuoksi takaisin Puolan alueelle, jossa hänellä myös oli
tarkoitus täyttää joukkoonsa syntyneet aukot uusilla vapaaehtoisilla
sekä saada tarkempia tietoja asiain kulusta.
Uutisia tulikin pian, ja ne olivat niin ilahduttavia, että Kmicic oli tulla
mielettömäksi ilosta. Osoittautui kylläkin todeksi, että
kolmipäiväisessä taistelussa Varsovan luona Jan Kasimir oli joutunut
tappiolle, mutta mistä syystä?
Suurin osa nostoväkeä oli jo ennen taistelua mennyt kotiinsa, eikä

jäljellejäänyt osa siitä taistellut sillä innolla kuin Varsovaa
valloitettaessa, vaan lähti kolmantena päivänä pakoon. Mutta
kahtena eepillisenä päivänä sen sijaan voitto oli kallistumassa
puolalaisten puolelle. Säännölliset joukot osoittivat suuressa
taistelussa Euroopan parhaiten harjoitettuja sotilaita vastaan
sellaista taitoa ja kestävyyttä, että ruotsalaiset ja brandenburgilaiset
kenraalit sitä ihmettelivät.
Jan Kasimir oli saavuttanut kuolemattoman kunnian. Sanottiin, että

hän oli osoittanut olevansa Kaarle Kustaan veroinen sotapäällikkö, ja
jos kaikkia hänen määräyksiään olisi noudatettu, olisi vihollinen
joutunut päätaistelussa tappiolle ja sota olisi ollut lopussa.
Nämä tiedot Kmicic sai silminnäkijöiltä. Hän tapasi nimittäin

aatelismiehiä, jotka itse olivat ottaneet osaa taisteluun. Yksi heistä
kertoi kuuluisasta husaarien hyökkäyksestä, jossa Carolus, kunhan
kenraaliensa kehoituksista huolimatta ei tahtonut peräytyä, oli
vähällä menettää henkensä. Kaikki vakuuttivat, että armeija ei ollut
tuhoutunut eivätkä hetmanit kaatuneet. Koko sotajoukko,
lukuunottamatta nostoväkeä, oli hyvässä kunnossa ja hyvässä
järjestyksessä peräytynyt kauemmaksi sisämaahan.
Varsovan silta oli murtunut, mutta siinä menetettiin vain tykit,

"henki siirtyi Veikselin yli". Sotamiehet vannoivat kuin yhdestä
suusta, että sellaisen päällikön johdolla kuin Jan Kasimir he ensi
taistelussa voittavat Kaarle Kustaan, vaaliruhtinaan ja kenet tahansa,
sillä tuo äskeinen taistelu oli ollut vain koe, joka tosin ei ollut
onnistunut, mutta joka lupasi hyvää.
Kmicic mietiskeli, mistä oli mahtanut johtua, että ensimmäiset

tiedot olivat olleet niin peloittavia. Hänelle selitettiin, että Kaarle
Kustaa tahallaan oli levityttänyt liioiteltuja tietoja, mutta että hän itse
asiassa oli sangen neuvoton. Ruotsalaiset upseerit, jotka Kmicic
viikkoa myöhemmin sai vangiksi, vahvistivat tämän todeksi.
Näiltä hän sai myös tietää, että varsinkin vaaliruhtinas oli hyvin
levoton ja alkoi yhä enemmän miettiä oman nahkansa pelastamista.
Hänen miehiään oli paljon kaatunut Varsovan edustalla, ja
jäljellejääneitten keskuudessa raivosi tauteja, joihin kuoli enemmän
miehiä kuin taisteluun. Samaan aikaan suurpuolalaiset, kostaakseen
Ujscien luona kokemansa häpeän ja kaikki kärsimänsä vääryydet,
olivat hyökänneet Brandenburgiin ja hävittivät sitä julmasti.
Ruotsalaisten upseerien käsityksen mukaan oli jo lähellä se hetki,
jolloin vaaliruhtinas luopuu ruotsalaisista ja liittyy mahtavampiin.
— Täytyy näin ollen pitää häntä kuumana, että hän tekisi sen sitä
pikemmin, — ajatteli Kmicic.
Ja koska hevoset nyt olivat levänneet ja aukot riveissä täytetyt,

meni hän taas rajan yli ja hyökkäsi kuin hävityksen henki saksalaisen
asutuksen kimppuun.
Monet "puolueet" seurasivat hänen esimerkkiään. Hän kohtasi nyt
heikompaa vastarintaa ja teki sitä perusteellisemmin hävitystyötään.
Tuli yhä iloisempia uutisia, niin iloisia, että niitä oli vaikea uskoa.
Ensiksikin alettiin huhuilla, että Kaarle Kustaa, joka Varsovan

taistelun jälkeen oli edennyt Radomiin asti, peräytyi nyt suin päin
Preussia kohti. Mitä oli tapahtunut? Miksi hän peräytyi? Näihin
kysymyksiin ei aluksi kukaan voinut vastata, mutta sitten kaikui taas
yli koko valtakunnan Czarnieckin nimi. Hän voitti vihollisen Lipan
luona, voitti Strzemesznyn luona, hakkasi Rawan luona maahan
peräytyvän Kaarle Kustaan koko jälkijoukon, minkä jälkeen hän,
saatuaan kuulla, että kaksituhatta ratsumiestä oli palaamassa
Krakovasta, hyökkäsi niiden kimppuun ja tuhosi ne viimeiseen
mieheen. Eversti Forgell, kenraalin veli, neljä muuta everstiä, kolme
majuria, kolmetoista ratsumestaria ja kaksikymmentä luutnanttia
otettiin vangiksi. Jotkut mainitsivat tämän lukumäärän
kaksinkertaisena, toiset vakuuttivat jo innoissaan, että Jan Kasimir ei
ollut kärsinytkin tappiota Varsovan luona, vaan voittanut, ja että
hänen vetäytymisensä syvemmälle maahan oli vain sotajuoni
vihollisen pään menoksi.
Kmicic itsekin alkoi ajatella näin, sillä nuoruudestaan asti sotaa

käyneenä miehenä hän ymmärsi sota-asioita eikä ollut vielä koskaan
kuullut sellaisesta voitosta, joka oli voittajalle vahingoksi. Mutta
ruotsalaisten asiat ilmeisesti huononivat nimenomaan Varsovan
taistelun jälkeen.
Silloin herra Andrzej muisti, mitä Zagloba heidän viimeksi

tavatessaan oli sanonut, nimittäin että mitkään voitot eivät enää voi
korjata ruotsalaisten asioita, mutta yksi suuri tappio heidät tuhoaa.
— Sillä miehellä on valtiomiehen pää! — ajatteli Kmicic. — Hän
lukee tulevaisuuden kuin avoimesta kirjasta.
Ja nyt hän muisti, mitä Zagloba vielä lisäksi oli ennustanut,

nimittäin että hän, Kmicic, alias Babinicz, pääsee Taurogiin, löytää
Oleńkansa, saa häneltä anteeksi, menee hänen kanssaan naimisiin
ja saa lapsia isänmaan hyödyksi. Kun hän muisti tämän, tunsi hän
kuin tulta olisi ollut hänen suonissaan. Hän ei tahtonut enää hukata
hetkeäkään, vaan päätti jättää Preussin ja rientää Taurogiin.
Juuri kun hän oli lähdössä, saapui hänen luokseen Wolodyjowskin

rykmentissä palveleva laudalainen aatelismies tuoden kirjeen
pieneltä ritarilta.
"Olemme menossa Liettuan hetmanin johdolla Boguslawia ja

Waldeckia vastaan", kirjoitti herra Michal. "Yhtykää meihin, sillä nyt
tarjoutuu tilaisuus kostoon, ja preussilaisetkin saavat maksaa pahat
tekonsa."
Herra Andrzej ei ollut uskoa silmiään ja ajatteli ensin, että

aatelismiehen oli joku preussilainen tahi ruotsalainen päällikkö
tahallaan lähettänyt saadakseen hänet joukkoineen satimeen.
Lähtisikö Gosiewski todellakin toistamiseen Preussia vastaan? Hän
ei kuitenkaan voinut olla uskomatta. Käsiala oli Wolodyjowskin,
vaakuna niinikään Wolodyjowskin, ja aatelismiehenkin Kmicic muisti
nähneensä. Hän ryhtyi senvuoksi tältä kyselemään, missä herra
Gosiewski oli ja minne hän aikoi mennä.
Aatelismies näytti olevan verraten typerä. Mistäpä hän tiesi, mihin

herra hetmani aikoi mennä? Sen hän vain tiesi, että hetmani oli
liettualais-tataarilaisen divisioonansa kanssa kahden päivän matkan
päässä ja että hänellä oli mukanaan myös laudalainen rykmentti.
Sitä oli herra Czarniecki joksikin aikaa lainannut, mutta nyt se oli
hetmanin johdossa.
— Sanotaan, — lopetti aatelismies, — että menemme Preussiin,

ja sotamiehet ovat siitä suuresti iloissaan… Mutta meidän
asiammehan on vain totella ja taistella.
Kuultuaan hänen kertomuksensa Kmicic ei kauan arvellut, käänsi

joukkonsa ympäri ja lähti kiiruhtamaan hetmanin luo. Kahden päivän
kuluttua hän myöhään illalla syleili Wolodyjowskia, joka heti
tervehdittyään sanoi:
— Kreivi Waldeck ja ruhtinas Boguslaw ovat Prostkissa ja

rakentavat valleja leirinsä lujittamiseksi. Me menemme heitä
vastaan.
— Tänäänkö? — kysyi Kmicic.
— Huomenna, toisin sanoen parin kolmen tunnin kuluttua.
Ja he syleilivät taas toisiaan.
— Minulla on se tunne, että Jumala antaa hänet käsiimme! —

huudahti
Kmicic liikutettuna.
— Niin minäkin luulen.
— Olen tehnyt lupauksen, että perinpohjaisesti paastoan sinä

päivänä, jolloin kohtaan hänet.
— Jumala ei jätä suojelustaan antamatta! — vastasi herra Michal.

— Minä en kadehdi, jos arpa lankeaa teille, sillä te olette kärsinyt
suuremman vääryyden.
— Herra Michal! En ole tavannut jalompaa ritaria kuin te!
— Antakaahan kun katselen teitä! Olette paahtunut aivan mustaksi

ulkoilmassa. Mutta hyvin olette hoitanut asianne. Suurella
myötätunnolla on koko divisioona seurannut työtänne. Vain raunioita
ja ruumiita! Olette synnynnäinen soturi. Itse Zaglobankin, jos hän
olisi täällä, olisi vaikea keksiä, mitä vielä suurenmoisempaa hän
sanoisi tehneensä.
— Hyväinen aika! Missä herra Zagloba on?
— Hän jäi herra Sapiehan luo, sillä hänen kasvonsa ovat aivan
turvoksissa itkusta ja epätoivosta Roch Kowalskin kaaduttua.
— Onko siis herra Kowalski kaatunut? Wolodyjowski puristi

huulensa yhteen.
— Tiedättekö, kuka hänet surmasi?
— Kuinka minä voisin sen tietää? Kertokaa!
— Ruhtinas Boguslaw!
Kmicic vavahti kuin häntä olisi tikarilla pistetty ja alkoi haukkoa

ilmaa. Viimein hän kiristi hampaitaan, vaipui penkille ja peitti
kasvonsa käsiinsä.
Wolodyjowski löi yhteen kämmeniään ja käski palvelijan tuoda

juotavaa.
Sitten hän istuutui Kmicicin viereen, täytti pikarit ja alkoi puhua.
— Roch Kowalski kuoli sellaisen sankarikuoleman, että suokoon
Jumala meille samanlaisen. Riittää, kun sanon, että taistelun
päätyttyä Carolus itse piti huolta hänen hautaamisestaan, ja
kokonainen kaartinrykmentti ampui hänen haudallaan
kunnialaukaukset.
— Kunhan hän vain ei olisi kaatunut tuon pirullisen miehen käden

kautta! — huudahti Kmicic.
— Niin, se oli Boguslawin käden kautta, kuulin sen husaareilta,

jotka omin silmin näkivät tuon surullisen tapauksen.
— Te siis ette ollut siellä?
— Taistelussa ei valita paikkaa, vaan seisotaan siinä, mihin on

saanut käskyn asettua. Jos minä olisin ollut siellä, niin joko nyt en
olisi tässä tahi Boguslaw ei laittaisi valleja Protskissa.
— Kertokaa, miten kaikki tapahtui. Se lisää vain katkeruutta.
Wolodyjowski tyhjensi pikarin, kuivasi keltaisia viiksiään ja alkoi:
— Varmaankin olette kuullut riittävästi kertomuksia Varsovan

taistelusta, sillä kaikki puhuvat siitä, enkä minä tahdo tarpeettoman
kauan siinä viivähtää. Armollinen kuninkaamme — suokoon Jumala
hänelle terveyttä ja pitkän iän, sillä jonkun muun ollessa hallitsijana
olisi isänmaa sortunut onnettomuuksien alle — osoittautui
oivalliseksi sotapäälliköksi. Jos kuuliaisuus olisi ollut yhtä hyvä kuin
johtaja, jos me olisimme olleet hänen arvoisensa, olisi aikakirjoihin
merkitty uusi puolalaisten voitto Varsovan luona. Lyhyesti sanoen,
ensimmäisenä päivänä me löimme ruotsalaiset. Toisena päivänä
alkoi voitto vaappua vuoroin puolelle ja vuoroin toiselle, mutta
yleensä me olimme voitolla. liettualaiset husaarit, joita johti suuri
soturi, ruhtinas Polubinski, ja joiden joukossa myös Roch palveli,
tekivät hyökkäyksen. Näin heidän lähtönsä yhtä selvästi kuin nyt
teidät, sillä seisoin laudalaisineni eräällä kummulla vallien edustalla.
Heitä oli tuhatkaksisataa miestä, niin komeata joukkoa, että maailma
ei ole nähnyt sen veroista. He kulkivat noin sadan sylen päässä
ohitsemme, ja maa vapisi heidän allaan. Näimme
brandenburgilaisen jalkaväen iskevän keihäät maahan torjuakseen
ensimmäisen hyökkäyksen. Toiset ampuivat musketeilla niin, että
peittyivät kokonaan savuun. Näimme husaarien syöksyvän täyttä
laukkaa päin. Jumalani, millainen hyökkäys! He syöksyivät savun
keskelle ja hävisivät näkyvistä. Sotamieheni alkoivat huutaa:
"Murtautuvat! Murtautuvat!" Vähään aikaan ei näkynyt mitään. Mutta
sitten alkoi kuulua kalkutusta aivan kuin tuhat seppää olisi takonut
vasaroillaan. Katsomme savuun. Jeesus, Maria! Vaaliruhtinaan
miehet makaavat maassa kuin vilja, jonka yli myrsky on kulkenut.
Mutta husaarit ovat jo sivuuttaneet heidät ja ovat jo kaukana. He
ryntäävät ruotsalaisia vastaan. Hyökkäävät ratsuväkeä vastaan ja
lyövät sen. Hyökkäsivät toista rykmenttiä vastaan ja löivät senkin.
Kuuluu pauketta, tykit jyrisevät… me näemme heidät, kun tuuli
haihduttaa savun. He murtavat ruotsalaisen jalkaväen rivit. Kaikki
horjuu, kaikki kaatuu heidän edessään, he kulkevat kuin katua… he
ovat raivanneet itselleen tien melkein koko armeijan läpi. He
hyökkäävät kaartinrykmenttiä vastaan, jonka keskellä on itse
Carolus… ja kaarti hajoaa kuin tuuleen…
Tässä Wolodyjowski keskeytti kertomuksensa, sillä Kmicic peitti

kasvonsa käsiinsä ja alkoi huutaa:
— Oi, Pyhä Jumalan Äiti! Saada kerran nähdä tuollaista ja sitten

kuolla!

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(Download PDF) Chinese Writing and The Rise of The Vernacular in East Asia Peter Francis Kornicki Full Chapter PDF

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Chinese Writing and the Rise of the

Vernacular in East Asia Peter Francis

The Future of East Asia 1st Edition Peter Hayes

The Origins of Chinese Writing Paola Demattè

The Political Economy of Automotive Industrialization

The Rise of China and International Law: Taking Chinese

War and Trade in Maritime East Asia Mihoko Oka

The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and

The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements in East Asia

The Ecology of Tropical East Asia 3rd Edition

Languages, Scripts, and Chinese

Languages, Scripts, and

‘All under the heavens use the same writing’

Dedicated with love to my parents:

Conclusion: Sinitic and the Evolution of Vernacular

List of Illustrations and Maps

xvi List of Illustrations and Maps

List of Table and Boxes

1 For details see Wilkinson 2015, 509–19.

Dynasties and Periods

China Japan Korea Vietnam

1 See the website of the International Dunhuang Project: http://idp.bl.uk/.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/12/17, SPi

Bengal THAILAND Islands

2 On the Manchus see Crossley 1997.

5 Uezato 1998, 4. 6 Akamine 2017. 7 McBride 2008.

Abbreviations and References

Scope and Objectives

2 Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

3 Yee 1994, 170–7; Unno 1994, 404–10; Lee Chan 2005.

4 Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

of geography. Nevertheless, there was no sense of regional solidarity in the face of

submissive tributary states; what is more, the language of Chinese universalism

6 Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

20 Quốc s ử dị biên, 346; Holcombe 2001, 41.

8 Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

24 Noh 2014, 283–311.

28 Jansen 1992, 106, 116–18; Ōkubo 1972, 1: 164. 29 Miwa 1968.

10 Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

34 Schmid 2002, 55. 35 Kim Keongil 2010, 107–13.

12 Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

14 Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

— Olette, kuulemma, pitänyt häntä lujilla! — sanoi Wolodyjowski

— Niin, tuota lurjusta! — lisäsi Zagloba. — Hän kuuluu hikoilleen

— Minusta näyttää mahdolliselta, — sanoi Wolodyjowski

— Suokoon Jumala sen! Itsekin olen sitä toivonut, — vastasi

— Mitäpä sotajuonet toimittavatkaan! — huudahti Wolodyjowski.

Tämä lausuma loukkasi hiukan Zaglobaa. Hän vastasi heti:

— Mitä herra Kowalski hommailee? — kysyi Kmicic.

— Herra Kowalski? Nyt hänellä jo on rautakypärä päässä, ja

— Te haukutte aina Kowalskia, — sanoi Wolodyjowski, — mutta

— Pidän hänestä enemmän kuin teistä, herra Michal, koska en

— Taikka niinkuin ne Kazanowskien apinat, joitten kanssa

— Naurakaa, naurakaa, saatte ensikerralla itse valloittaa

— Kuka Krakovan portin expugnavit? Kuka sai toimeen, että

— Hyvät ystävät! — huudahti Kmicic. — Tehkää minulle se

Zagloba pani sormen otsalleen.

— Kuulkaa nyt minun politiikkaani, — sanoi hän, — sillä se, mitä

— Kyllä, kyllä! Puhukaa!

— Tuossa päätaistelussa me joko joudumme tappiolle tahi

— Sen tietää jokainen! — keskeytti Wolodyjowski.

— Parempi olisi, että olisitte vaiti ja oppisitte, herra Michal!

— Sanon teille, että ei käy mitenkään! — lausui Zagloba. — Te