A Tang-Dynasty Manual of Governance and the East Asian Vernaculars

The Essentials of Government in the Zhenguan Era (Zhenguan zhengyao) is a text that was compiled in the Tang dynasty after the death of the founding emperor, Taizong (r. 626-649). It circulated widely throughout East Asia but unlike many other texts that emanated from China it was often approached via the vernacular: there were translations into the Tangut, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongolian, and Japanese languages, but not into Korean. This article explores its reception in various East Asian societies and suggests that the use of the vernacular was determined by the role of this work as a practical manua

Sir Ernest Satow’s Private Letters to W. G. Aston and F. V. Dickins : The Correspondence of a Pioneer Japanologist from 1870 to 1918

1. PRO 30/33 11/2 Satow to Aston (1870-81)|2. PRO 30/33 11/3 Satow to Aston (1882-1909)|3. PRO 30/33 11/5 Satow to Dickins (1877-90)|4. PRO 30/33 11/6 Satow to Dickins (1891-1905)|5. PRO 30/33 11/7 Satow to Dickins (1906-18

Development of electronic and hi tech industry in Indonesia and Malaysia comparative charecteristics

Malaysia and Indonesia belong to the group of quickly developing Asian countries in rapid development. In both countries particular importance has been attributed to the electronic industry. The process of its development can be analysed as structured in three stages. The first one - is the period of the sixties and of the first half of the seventies, when the mass production of export electronic component - semiconductors and simple integrated systems, was developed in Malaysia, while in Indonesia it was the production of technologically slightly obsolete electronic articles for the domestic market. In the middle of the eighties diversification of the production of electronic industry took place. On the basis of the components already in production the export-oriented industry of electronic consumption goods developed. Similar industry basing its production on the components from Malaysia appeared in Indonesia, coexisting with the production of cheaper goods for the local market. The next stage is the development of hi tech industry and its non-productive branches in the nineties: software, multimedia, peripheral systems, research and technology development, biotechnology. Malaysia is still more competitive on that market. Strong concentration in tax-free zones along the western coast of Malaysian Peninsula and on the Indonesian island of Batam as well as in western Java, especcially in Djakarta agglomeration, are the main spatial features of this industrial sector

Catalogue of pre-modern Japanese maps held in the British Library

Japan has a long history of cartography but it was only with the advent of commercial printing and publishing in the early seventeenth century that maps became everyday objects. In the course of the Edo period (1600-1868) an extraordinary quantity of maps were printed for popular sale and distribution, all printed xylographically (with woodblocks). Some of these were frequently revised and updated, and towards the end of the period colour-printed maps became commonplace. The British Library has an unusually large collection of xylographic maps produced in Japan, most in the Map Collection but a significant quantity in the Japanese Collection as well, but hitherto there has been no classified catalogue of them. This catalogue provides bibliographic descriptions of all the pre-modern Japanese maps that it has been possible to identify in the various collections of the British Library. There may be some others that have been miscatalogued and hence not identified. The maps included are Japanese maps not solely in the sense of maps of Japan but also in the sense of maps of other localities (China, Korea, and the world) which were produced in Japan. Most of the maps listed are either manuscripts or xylographs (printed with woodblocks), but a few nineteenth-century items are copperplate engravings. In the context of Japan, the term ‘pre-modern’ is usually taken to indicate the Edo period (1600-1868) but no hard and fast cut-off date is applied in this catalogue: all xylographic maps are included whenever they were printed

East and South Asian Perspectives on History, Languages and Literatures - التاريخ، واللغات، والآداب من منظور شرق وجنوب أسيوي

[In this conversation, the authors discuss their scholarly trajectories working on history, languages and literatures in their areas of expertise—North India in the case of one, and East Asia in the case of the other. Their discussion covers multilingualism and the role of orality in North India, the role of written Chinese and its interaction with the vernaculars in East Asia, the importance of scripts and the history of books and writing. .في هذا الحوار، يناقش الكاتبان مساريهما الأكاديميين في مجالات التاريخ واللغات والآداب بفرعي تخصصهما المختلفين: شمال الهند في حالة الأولى، وشرق آسيا في حالة الثاني. يتناول الحوار عدة مواضيع، من ضمنها: التعددية اللغوية ودور الشفاهية في شمال الهند، ودور اللغة الصينية المكتوبة وتفاعلها مع اللغات العامية في شرق آسيا، وأهمية الوثائق المدونة، وتاريخ الكتاب والكتابة

Having difficulty with Chinese? - the rise of the vernacular book in Japan, Korea and Vietnam

This lecture was held as the Sandars lecture in 2008. It was held in three parts on Monday 10 March, Tuesday 11 March and Thursday 13 March 2008