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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/12/17, SPi
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
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© Peter Francis Kornicki 2018
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First Edition published in 2018
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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
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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,
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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
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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
Bibliography 313
Index 377
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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
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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
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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