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

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

Buddhist Texts on Gold and Other Metals in East Asia : Preliminary Observations

This article focuses on a small number of Buddhist texts that have been produced on metal, including precious metals, in East Asia. This practice is known from documentary and scriptural references but also from finds in what are now Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Once the scriptural references had been translated into Chinese they became available to all parts of East Asia where the Chinese Buddhist canon was the norm. In Korea, the Khitan empire, Japan and elsewhere a few examples have been found of Buddhist texts on precious metals; for the most part it seems that these were buried in the foundations of stupas and pagodas. In most cases the texts were inscribed, but in a few cases they were created using the repoussé technique to produce a whole page at a time. In this article we give preliminary consideration to the production of Buddhist texts on metal in East Asia and ask why there is so much variation and why so many of the texts are incomplete

The novels of Ozaki Kōyō

This is a study of some of the works of the Japanese novelist, Ozaki Kōyō (1867-1903). The aim has been to identify the legacy that the fiction of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) left in his work, so comparatively little attention has been paid to his life or to works that throw no light on this question, such as his adaptations and translations of western literature. Kōyō's fiction was influenced by two distinct literary traditions from the Tokugawa period. His interest in ninjōbon, a genre of romantic novel, spanned his creative life and imparted to his works a tendency towards complex romantic plots and a concern for realistic dialogue. For a few years, however, this source of influence yielded to another: Koyo was involved in the revival of the works of Ihara Saikaku which took place in the years around 1890, and this profoundly affected his language and style for several years. Attempts to imitate Saikaku's fiction also enabled him to experiment with uses of the narrator that were foreign to ninjōbon writers, and he became progressively more interested in probing the minds of his characters. He took these developments further in his last two novels, stimulated both by the western fiction he had read and by current literary fashions. In Tajō takon he used the narrator to express his rejection of views of marriage imported from the West; in Konjiki yasha he combined the qualities of ninjobon with a study of usury. Apart from revealing some of the areas in which Meiji fiction was indebted to tradition, Kōyō's works show that the influence of Tokugawst fiction was not always as harmful as it is often supposed to be

Meiji at 150 Podcast, Episode 024, Prof. Peter Kornicki (University of Cambridge)

In this episode, Prof. Kornicki challenges the narrative of the Meiji period as revolutionary, instead underlining continuities in literary tastes, practices, and writing through the 1880s. We discuss the origins, meaning of, and alternatives to the term “Restoration,” literary transitions in the mid-Meiji Period, and popular discontentment and protest.Arts, Faculty ofHistory, Department ofNon UBCUnreviewedFacult