For hundreds of years until the 1900s, in today’s China, Japan, North and South Korea, and Vietnam, literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic (wényán 文言) could communicate in writing interactively, despite not speaking each other’s languages. This book outlines the historical background of, and the material conditions that led to, widespread literacy development in premodern and early modern East Asia, where reading and writing for formal purposes was conducted in Literary Sinitic. To exemplify how ‘silent conversation’ or ‘brush-assisted conversation’ is possible through writing-mediated brushed interaction, synchronously face-to-face, this book presents contextualized examples from recurrent contexts involving (i) boat drifters; (ii) traveling literati; and (iii) diplo- matic envoys. Where profound knowledge of classical canons and literary works in Sinitic was a shared attribute of the brush-talkers concerned, their brush-talk would characteristically be intertwined with poetic improvisation.
Being the first monograph in English to address this fascinating lingua-cultural practice and cross-border communication phenomenon, which was possibly sui generis in Sinographic East Asia, it will be of interest to students of not only East Asian languages and linguistics, history, international relations, and diplomacy, but also (historical) pragmatics, sociolinguistics, sociology of language, scripts and writing systems, and cultural and linguistic anthropology.
Author(s): David C. S. Li (editor), Reijiro Aoyama (editorx), Tak-sum Wong (editor)
Series: Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 359
City: London
Contents
Frontispiece 1
Frontispiece 2
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Foreword to Brush Conversation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis: the second miracle
Preface
Epigraph
Map
1 Writing-mediated cross-border communication face-to-face: from Sinitic brush-talk (漢文筆談) to pen-assisted conversation • David C. S. Li, Reijiro Aoyama and Wong Tak-sum
2 East Asian brush-talk literature: introduction and proposed classification • Wang Yong
Part 1: Brush-talk involving traveling literati and boat drifters in East Asia
3 Brush conversation between maritime officials and foreign seafarers in drifting records in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century East Asia • Matsuura Akira and Reijiro Aoyama
4 Senzaimaru’s maiden voyage to Shanghai in 1862: brush conversation between Japanese travelers and people they encountered in Qing China • David C. S. Li and Reijiro Aoyama
5 Identity verification and negotiation through Sinitic brush-talk in Ming China and Japan: drifting accounts by Ch’oe Pu (1488) and Yi Chi-hang (1696–1697) • Hur Kyoung-jin
6 A study of salient linguistic features of two Ryukyuan brush conversations in Sinitic, 1611 and 1803 • Wong Tak-sum
Part 2: Brush-talk involving diplomatic envoys in East Asia
7 Sinitic brush-talk between Vietnam and China in the eighteenth century: a study of vice-envoy Lê Quý Đôn’s mission to Qing China • Nguyễn Tuấn-Cường and Nguyễn Thị-Tuyết
8 Lingua-cultural characteristics of brush-talk: insights from Ōkōchi Documents大河內文書 • Wang Baoping
9 The charm and pitfalls of Sinitic brush-talk: a study of brush conversation records involving the first legation staff of Late Qing China in Japan (1870s–1880s) • Liu Yuzhen
10 Japanese-Korean brush-talk during the early Edo period,1603–1711 • Koo Jea-hyoun and Joo Ian
11 Brush- talk between Chosŏn envoys and Tokugawa literati: contesting cultural superiority and ‘central efflorescence’中華, 1711–1811 • Jang Jin-youp
Part 3: Script-specific communication in Sinitic: significance for historical pragmatics, cultural anthropology, and East Asian studies
12 Sociocultural functions of Chinese characters and writing: transnational brush-talk encounters in mid-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century East Asia • Reijiro Aoyama
13 Discussion paper • Rebekah Clements
Index
