Welten Ostasiens / Worlds of East Asia / Mondes de l’Extrême Orient

Human existence is fundamentally defined by time. Throughout history and across cultures, societies have negotiated time in various ways. This monograph studies temporality as it emerges from diaries produced by government officials during the late thirteenth century in Japan, thereby contributing a perspective gleaned from non-literary texts to the study of time in the social sphere of noble elites in the Kamakura period. In synthesising different approaches to the study of time, it analyses various aspects of time to obtain a comprehensive picture of how time is expressed in these diaries, scrutinise the time practices that they disclose, and reflect on related conceptualisations and evaluations of time.

The monograph argues that we may discern a plurality of coexisting modes of time and that certain aspects and concerns took precedence over others in different situations depending on the symbolic forms that dominated them. As part of the ‘Time in Medieval Japan’ (TIMEJ) research project of the University of Zurich, this research aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of medieval Japan as multi-faceted society with diverse approaches to time.

The Mu Tianzi Zhuan, which translates as the "Chronicle of [King] Mu, Son-of Heaven," is considered the oldest surviving account of travel in Chinese literary history. It describes the travels undertaken by King Mu in the tenth century BC. This German translation is the first translation into a Western language in over forty years and is accompanied by a comprehensive critical apparatus.

The Lǐyē 里耶 text corpus, which is named after an ancient township in present-day Lóngshān 龍山, Húnán province, grants unique opportunities to reshape the image and redefine our knowledge about social, legal, political, administrative and ritual responsibilities of the first Chinese empire. The impressive collection of over 37,000 documents span a time period from 222 to 208 BC and grant a unique opportunity to reshape the image and redefine our knowledge about social, legal, political, logistical and ritual responsibilities of the first Chinese empire. This book is concerned with the overall governance at the southern fringes of the Qín dynasty as reflected in the excavated documents from Lǐyē well J1. It contributes to a revised understanding of the Qín dynasty by demonstrating that the degree of decentralization in the empire was high and to a large extent coordinated by relatively autonomously governed regions. It furthermore displays the Qín dynasty’s strong sense of historical continuity and a desire to strive towards unification by embracing the predominant standards of earlier rulers.

After an introductory part on the Lǐyē material, this book analyzes Qín’s sophisticated methods of calendar and timekeeping. It then dwells into the territoriality of the young empire and focuses on unification attempts bound to transform the pre-imperial multistate order into a standardized system of governance and control. The last part deals with the organization of essential resources, including unprecedented tax calculations ‘district’ (xiāng 鄉) level. Overall, this book offers a fascinating glimpse at the many microstructures and complexities in the peripheral area of a larger administration. The manuscripts available to us to this day and the ones that will be excavated from wells J2 and J3 in the future will undoubtedly continue to be a basic reference point when it comes to the research of pre-imperial and early imperial documents.

This volume presents an investigation of the category of the spatial based on Chinese philosophical and art theoretical texts of the 17th century. The epistemological reconstructions and analyses of source examples present the conceptions of space at the intersections of Chinese scholars' reflections on reality, the universe, human cognition, and linguistic and visual expressive capacities.

The study focuses on the writings of Hong Kong philosopher Lao Sze-kwang (1927–2012) from the 1950s onward. His work in reception and cultural theory shows how liberal viewpoints were debated in the colonial-influenced environment of the Cold War. In both university and public discourse, Confucian values and ideas were discussed and reinterpreted.

The book offers a cultural, historical and literary study of dream narration in Chinese literature (particularly in the literary genres of xiaoshuo 小說, "petty talk" and biji 筆記, "notebook"). It considers texts from Late Imperial China (13^th–19^th centuries), with an emphasis on the early/mid-Qing dynasty.

The fundamental characteristics of Japanese narrative texts written between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries can be defined using the categories voice, perspective, and distance. This volume critically reviews existing theories to build the methodological foundation for narratological research into this literature. This theory of Japanese narrative thus makes a contribution to both narratology and Japanese studies.

This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume’s essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.

Which relationship should, must, or can creation in language (fiction) have to creation outside of language (reality)? How do theoretical notions of literary art change when reality drastically changes? This volume investigates these questions in relation to the literature and social history of Japan from 1850 to 1890.

What did Old Chinese prose sound like? Supported by digital texts, modern technologies and historical linguistics, Chinese Euphonics is a deep dive into the types of sound patterns that occur throughout the earliest corpora of narrative texts in the Chinese canon: the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, the Classic of Documents《尚書》and the Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals《春秋左傳》.

Tharsen demonstrates how sound patterns in the speeches preserved in these foundational texts functioned in concert with form and meaning to create "phonorhetoric," a tactic employed by some of the most eminent figures from Chinese antiquity to beautify and strengthen their arguments and ideas by making use of extensive phonological patterning and the power of sound.

Containing both a broad history of the study of prose rhyming and a wealth of new evidence, Chinese Euphonics lays the groundwork for a new and more comprehensive approach to the study of early Chinese texts.

The Gongsun Longzi is often considered the only extant work of the Classical Chinese “School of Names”, an early intellectual tradition (trad. dated to the 4^th cent. B.C.) mainly concerned with logic and the philosophy of language.

The Gongsun Longzi is a heterogeneous collection of five chapters that include short treatises and largely fictive dialogues between an anonymous persuader and his opponent, which typically revolve around a paradoxical claim. Its value as a testimony to Early Chinese philosophy, however, is somewhat controversial due to the intricate textual history of the text and our limited knowledge about its intellectual backgrounds.

This volume gathers contributions by leading specialists in the fields of Classical Chinese philosophy, philology, logic, and linguistics. Besides an overview of the scholarly literature on the topic and a detailed account of the reception of the text throughout time, it presents fresh insights into philological and philosophical problems raised by the Gongsun Longzi and other closely-related texts equally attributed to the “School of Names”.

For the first time this study presents and analyzes the early work of the major Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909–1995). After introducing the contexts in which his thought arose, the book presents aspects of his work on logic, including his ideas on the relationship between logic, perception, and knowledge. The insightful character of Mou’s texts make the book worthwhile reading.

This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.

Based on a discourse analysis of representative debates between 1920 and 1970 and applying Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field, this study describes the emergence, role, and self-understanding of the modern Japanese intellectual during the inter-war and post-war periods of the 20^th century and creates a portrait of the writer as an intellectual.

This thesis is a direct contribution in the field history of thoughts in Late Imperial China, and it adds insight about the reception of tradition in the first half of the 20th century, in particular Confucianism. It explores the criticism of one school (the orthodox daoxue-Confucianism) against another (hanxue-Confucianism) by studying one object of criticism in particular. The author of the criticism, Fang Dongshu (1772-1851), attacks Dai Zhen (1723-1777). Hitherto, research in the 20th century had celebrated Dai Zhen and the scholars of his school of thought/method as precursors to scientific thinking in pre-modern China. Similarly the orthodox schools were set aside as opponents to modernization of society and philosophy. Through the thorough study of arguments made on both sides, this thesis suggests a different understanding, because scholars that lived in a Confucian society had different requirements about Confucian teachings and their impact.
Considering the points Fang Dongshu points out about his adversaries contributes to a historically more accurate understanding of the history of Chinese philosophy before the Opium Wars and the end of the Imperial Age.

In this book senior Chinese physicians share how they have contributed to Chinese medicine throughout their careers. A decade of conversations with the author reveals sociocultural change and how their occupational paths manifest class background, gender, migration, and region. Since the Republican period, they tackle the question how Chinese medicine relates to pharmaceutical science and how it can be anchored in education nationwide. Since even earlier, this includes the debate surrounding materia medica and medical scientific exchange within Asia and transnationally. Their stories will show how they entered academia during anti-elite campaigns, the biographical turning point of institutionalization and the enforced or voluntary migration during the Maoist era. In post-reform China, they take stock of the effects of regulation and commercialization.

Mencius was a major political thinker in ancient China, a successor of Confucius and high-ranking advisor to the powerful princes of Qi. His work remains highly significant to this day in Chinese intellectual history. This book offers a comprehensive presentation of Mencius’s life and times, a translation of his work with detailed commentary, and appendices on chronology, history, and key terms.