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= Chapter 15: Eastern Europe — Sinology in Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Macedonia, and Belarus =

== Introduction ==

The sinological traditions of Eastern Europe possess a richness and depth that is often underappreciated in the Anglophone world. Shaped by the interplay of distinct historical forces — the Catholic and Orthodox missionary traditions, the political upheavals of partition, occupation, and communist rule, and a deep-rooted intellectual curiosity about civilisations beyond the European horizon — Eastern European sinology has produced a remarkable succession of scholars, translators, and institutions. This chapter surveys the development of Chinese studies in five countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Macedonia, and Belarus. Each has followed its own trajectory, yet all share certain features: an early encounter with China mediated by missionaries or diplomats; the decisive impact of twentieth-century political transformations; and, in the most recent period, a dynamic engagement with contemporary China studies driven by the expansion of Chinese language education and cultural exchange programmes.<ref>David B. Honey, ''Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology'' (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2001), preface, xxii.</ref>

== I. Poland ==

=== 1.1 Early Polish-Chinese Contacts ===

Poland’s documented contacts with China date to the thirteenth century. In 1241, the Mongol armies of Batu Khan, equipped with gunpowder weapons — a Chinese invention then unknown in Europe — annihilated a Polish-German force under Duke Henry the Pious at the Battle of Legnica. While no direct Polish-Chinese interaction is recorded from this engagement, it represents the first moment at which Poles experienced the material products of Chinese civilisation.<ref>Honey, ''Incense at the Altar'', preface, x.</ref>

More significant was the mission of Pope Innocent IV to the Mongol court in 1245–1246. The papal embassy, which included the Polish Franciscan Benedict of Poland (Benedykt Polak), travelled through Polish and Russian territories to the Volga, then onward to the Mongol capital of Karakorum, where they witnessed the enthronement of Güyük Khan. Benedict subsequently recorded his observations in what constitutes the earliest known Polish text with a bearing on China. The original letter from Güyük Khan to the Pope, discovered in 1920, is the oldest surviving diplomatic document of East-West relations.<ref>Zhang Xiping, lecture 1, “Introduction to Western Sinology Studies,” pp. 165–168.</ref>

=== 1.2 Polish Jesuits in China ===

With the founding of the Polish Province of the Society of Jesus in 1564, Polish missionaries began aspiring to reach the Far East. Four Poles are known to have reached China. Andrzej Rudomina (卢安德, 1595–1632) was the first; arriving in Macau in 1626, he studied Chinese in Jiading near Suzhou and composed two ascetic works in Chinese before his death from tuberculosis in Fuzhou. More consequential was Michał Boym (卜弥格, 1612–1659), a polymath from Lwów (present-day Lviv) whose contributions rank him among the founding figures of European sinology. Boym produced the first European botanical study of East Asian flora (''Flora Sinensis'', 1656); the first Latin-Chinese dictionary (1,561 characters); the first European description of Chinese pulse diagnosis (''Clavis Medica''); a monumental atlas of China’s eighteen provinces; and a meticulous translation and commentary on the Nestorian Stele of Xi’an, which became a cornerstone of Athanasius Kircher’s ''China Illustrata'' (1667). Boym was also a diplomat: entrusted by the Southern Ming emperor Yongli with a mission to Rome seeking European military aid against the Qing, he spent years travelling between Guangxi, Venice, and Rome before dying of illness in the borderlands of Guangxi in 1659.<ref>Peter K. Bol, “The China Historical GIS,” ''Journal of Chinese History'' 4, no. 2 (2020).</ref>

A third Polish Jesuit, Mikołaj Smogulecki (穆尼阁, 1610–1656), introduced logarithms to China through his Chinese collaborator Xue Fengzuo (薛凤祚), and was the first to bring the Copernican heliocentric theory to Chinese attention — a fact of considerable significance in the history of science. His astronomical works were later incorporated into the ''Siku Quanshu''.<ref>Hilde De Weerdt, “MARKUS: Text Analysis and Reading Platform,” in ''Journal of Chinese History'' 4, no. 2 (2020); see also the Digital Humanities guide at University of Chicago Library.</ref>

=== 1.3 The Birth of Academic Sinology ===

The partitions of Poland (1772–1795) and the ensuing 123 years of foreign domination interrupted the development of Polish scholarship in all fields. Nevertheless, individual Poles maintained an interest in China. The diplomat Michał Kołaczkowski, who worked as a sinologist and Chinese language instructor in Paris, was perhaps the most distinguished Polish-born sinologist of the nineteenth century. Jerzy Timkowski, who accompanied a Russian mission to Beijing in 1820–1821, published ''Reise nach China'' (1825), a valuable early account.<ref>Tu Hsiu-chih, “DocuSky, A Personal Digital Humanities Platform for Scholars,” ''Journal of Chinese History'' 4, no. 2 (2020).</ref>

Modern Polish sinology began after the restoration of independence in 1918. In 1919, Bogdan Richter established a Far East seminar at the University of Warsaw. The formal institutionalisation came in 1933, when the Warsaw University Department of Sinology was created under Jan Jaworski, who had studied under Marcel Granet in Paris. Jaworski perished in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, but not before training a generation of students through clandestine wartime instruction.<ref>Peter K. Bol and Wen-chin Chang, “The China Biographical Database,” in ''Digital Humanities and East Asian Studies'' (Leiden: Brill, 2020).</ref>

=== 1.4 Witold Jabłoński and the Flowering of Polish Sinology ===

The towering figure of twentieth-century Polish sinology is Witold Jabłoński (夏伯龙, 1901–1957). A student of Granet at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Jabłoński spent two extended periods in China (1930–1932 at Tsinghua University; 1937–1938 at Yenching University), developing expertise in Chinese folk songs, art, and classical literature. His doctoral thesis, ''Personal Sentiment and Ritual in the'' Liji, applied the sociological methods of Durkheim and Granet to Chinese classical texts with considerable originality. Jabłoński became head of the Warsaw University Department of Sinology after the war and built it into one of the leading centres of Chinese studies in Europe. He translated Lao She’s ''Zhao Ziyue'' (the first Chinese novel rendered directly into any European language from the Chinese original), organised the translation of ''Mao Zedong’s Poems'', initiated a Polish rendering of the ''Zhuangzi'', and planned translations of the ''Shangshu'' and ''Chunqiu''. His published works — over seventy in Polish, French, English, and Chinese — span Chinese institutional history, folklore, philosophy, religion, and literature. He died suddenly in Beijing in July 1957, during his third visit to China, while following the route of the Long March to collect folk songs.<ref>See Chapter 22 (Translation) of this volume on AI translation challenges.</ref>

=== 1.5 Subsequent Generations ===

Jabłoński’s successors maintained the high standards he set. Janusz Chmielewski, who succeeded him as department chair, was a world-renowned expert on Chinese classical logic whom Joseph Needham invited to contribute to ''Science and Civilisation in China''. He co-produced, with Jabłoński and Wojciech Olejniczak, the finest European translation of the ''Zhuangzi'', distinguished by its copious annotations and philosophical commentary. Mieczyław Künstler (金思德) published extensively on Confucian thought, Chinese mythology, and art history, and was for many years chair of the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Oriental Committee. Tadeusz Żbikowski, a specialist in Yuan drama, translated the ''Xiyouji'' and ''Liaozhai Zhiyi''. Zbigniew Słupski authored the first systematic European study of Lao She’s life and work.<ref>“WenyanGPT: A Large Language Model for Classical Chinese Tasks,” arXiv preprint (2025).</ref>

=== 1.6 Contemporary Polish Sinology ===

Today, Chinese studies in Poland are offered at the University of Warsaw (the historic centre), Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (which established a sinology department in 1988 and co-founded a Confucius Institute in 2008), and Jagiellonian University in Kraków (which hosts Poland’s first Confucius Institute, founded in 2006). Several private institutions also offer Chinese language programmes. The field has expanded considerably since Poland’s accession to the European Union and the growth of Chinese economic engagement through the “16+1” (now “14+1”) cooperation framework.<ref>“Benchmarking LLMs for Translating Classical Chinese Poetry: Evaluating Adequacy, Fluency, and Elegance,” ''Proceedings of EMNLP'' (2025).</ref>

== II. Czech Republic ==

=== 2.1 Early Czech Encounters with China ===

Czech sinology possesses a distinguished pedigree. Among the Jesuit missionaries of the old Bohemian Province, eight served in China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most notable was Karel Slavíček (严嘉乐, c. 1678–1735), a Moravian who arrived in China in 1716 and spent nearly two decades in Beijing. Slavíček’s scholarly achievements include a treatise on Chinese music, a Chinese grammar, and a detailed map of Beijing. His most enduring contribution was his compilation of thirty-six solar eclipse records from the ''Chunqiu'' (Spring and Autumn Annals), which he cross-referenced with contemporary European astronomical data, demonstrating the accuracy of the ancient Chinese records — a bold defence of Chinese scientific culture against European scepticism.<ref>“A Multi Agent Classical Chinese Translation Method Based on Large Language Models,” ''Scientific Reports'' 15 (2025).</ref>

=== 2.2 Rudolf Dvořák and the Nineteenth-Century Foundations ===

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Charles University professor Rudolf Dvořák became the first Czech scholar to engage systematically with Chinese culture. His publications included ''The Life and Teachings of Confucius in China'' (1889), ''Religions of China'' (1895), and translations of the ''Shijing'' (1897) and ''Daodejing'' (1920), all of which achieved international recognition. However, Dvořák’s wide-ranging interests (he was an Orientalist in the broadest sense) meant that he did not train sinological successors, and Czech sinology stagnated for two decades after his death.<ref>See, e.g., Mark Edward Lewis and Curie Viragh, “Computational Stylistics and Chinese Literature,” ''Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture'' 9, no. 1 (2022).</ref>

=== 2.3 Jaroslav Průšek and the “Prague School” of Sinology ===

The modern era of Czech sinology is inseparable from the name of Jaroslav Průšek (1906–1980), universally acknowledged as one of the great sinologists of the twentieth century. Průšek spent five years in China (1932–1937), developing deep friendships with progressive Chinese intellectuals including Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, and Lu Xun — the last of whom wrote a preface specifically for Průšek’s Czech translation of ''Nahan'' (《呐喊》, ''Call to Arms''). In this preface, Lu Xun reflected on the shared experience of oppression that linked the Czech and Chinese peoples, writing: “Although our nations are different and our territories far apart, we can understand each other, because we have both walked the road of suffering.”<ref>Hilde De Weerdt, ''Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China'' (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015).</ref>

After the war, Průšek established the East Asian Studies Institute at Charles University (1947) and later directed the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He built what became known as the “Prague School” of sinology, training a cadre of specialists who made Czech sinology a force of European significance. Průšek’s own scholarship was prolific and wide-ranging: his ''Chinese History and Literature'' (1970) is a landmark study; he was the first European scholar to study Chinese popular literature, particularly the ''huaben'' tradition; and his Czech translations included works by Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Shen Fu’s ''Fusheng Liuji'', Liu E’s ''Lao Can Youji'', and Pu Songling’s ''Liaozhai Zhiyi''. Under his leadership, the Oriental Institute built a Chinese library of over 55,000 volumes — the largest in Central Europe — donated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and named the “Lu Xun Library.”<ref>China-Princeton Digital Humanities Workshop 2025 (chinesedh2025.eas.princeton.edu).</ref>

The political repression following the Soviet invasion of 1968 dealt a severe blow to Czech sinology. Průšek was expelled from the Oriental Institute and banned from academic activity. Several of his students fled abroad. Yet the tradition survived: Augustin Palát (白利德) became a leading historian of the Song dynasty; Dana Kalvodová (高德华) specialised in Chinese regional theatre; Oldřich Král studied the ''Honglou Meng'' and ''Rulin Waishi''; and Zdenka Heřmanová-Novotná (何德佳) researched Dunhuang bianwen and narrative literature.<ref>Zhang Xiping, lecture 1, pp. 54–60.</ref>

=== 2.4 Slovak Sinology: Marina Čarnogurská ===

Special mention is due to Marina Čarnogurská (“Black Mountain Lady”), the leading sinologist of Slovakia. Despite fifteen years of professional exile during the “normalisation” period (1973–1988), during which she was banned from publishing, she translated the entire ''Honglou Meng'' into Slovak — a monumental twelve-year undertaking completed in her spare time. Her four-volume edition, published after 2000 and winner of an international printing award, was donated to the National Library of China. She also produced Slovak translations of the ''Lunyu'' and ''Daodejing'' and published extensively on pre-Qin Confucian philosophy.<ref>Zhang Xiping, lecture 1, pp. 96–97, citing Li Xueqin.</ref>

=== 2.5 Contemporary Czech Sinology ===

Since 1989, Czech sinology has undergone a gradual recovery. Charles University’s Department of East Asian Studies continues to offer undergraduate and graduate programmes. The younger generation of scholars — including Olga Lomová (罗然), David Sehnal (戴维), and others — are active in contemporary Chinese literature, linguistics, and political studies. The nine-volume Czech-Chinese dictionary compiled during the difficult years of the 1970s–1980s remains an important reference work.<ref>Zhang Xiping, lecture 1, pp. 102–113.</ref>

== III. Romania ==

=== 3.1 Early Romanian Knowledge of China ===

Romania’s earliest connection with China came through an unlikely intermediary. Nicolae Milescu Spătaru (1636–1708), a Moldavian scholar-diplomat who entered Russian service, led a diplomatic mission to Beijing in 1675–1676 on behalf of Tsar Alexis I. Milescu met the Kangxi Emperor and produced three important texts — ''A Journey through Siberia'', ''Report on the Embassy to China'', and ''Description of China and the Great Amur River'' — that circulated in European diplomatic and scholarly circles. Though his mission failed politically, Milescu is honoured by both Romania and Moldova as the first member of their nation to establish direct contact with China.<ref>Zhang Xiping, lecture 1, pp. 114–117.</ref>

Romanian interest in Chinese culture grew during the nineteenth century under French cultural influence. In 1880, the literary critic Titu Maiorescu translated a story from the ''Jingu Qiguan'' into Romanian; in 1882, the poet Vasile Pogor rendered two Chinese poems. Romania’s greatest poet, Mihai Eminescu, studied Confucian educational philosophy, while the philosopher Lucian Blaga wrote penetrating essays on Daoism and Chinese aesthetics.<ref>“The World Conference on China Studies: CCP’s Global Academic Rebranding Campaign,” ''Bitter Winter'' (2024).</ref>

=== 3.2 Institutional Development After 1949 ===

Modern Romanian sinology dates from the establishment of Sino-Romanian diplomatic relations on 5 October 1949. The first cohort of Romanian students arrived in Beijing in November 1950, studying Chinese at Tsinghua and Peking universities under the guidance of luminaries including Lü Shuxiang. Among them was Romulus Ion (罗明), who would serve as Romania’s ambassador to China, and his wife Sanda-Maria (萨安娜), a historian.

In 1956, the University of Bucharest established a Chinese language programme within its Faculty of Foreign Languages, with Jiang Dongni, a graduate of Peking University, as its first instructor. The programme grew steadily, producing several hundred graduates over the following decades — many of whom became diplomats, translators, and scholars. Under the direction of Professor Yang Ling (杨玲), the Bucharest programme became the principal centre of Chinese studies in Romania. Since 2005, it has offered doctoral supervision in Asian cultural studies under Professor Luminița Bălan (维珊).<ref>Honey, ''Incense at the Altar'', preface, xxii.</ref>

=== 3.3 Translation and Literary Reception ===

Romanian translations of Chinese literature have been rich and varied. The 1950s saw a wave of translations from Russian intermediaries, focusing on revolutionary and socialist realist works (Ding Ling, Zhao Shuli, Zhou Libo). From the 1960s onward, attention shifted to classical Chinese poetry: Alexandru Stamatiad’s ''Din Flautul de Jad'' (From the Jade Flute, 1938), a selection of Li Bai’s poems, had already won the Romanian National Poetry Prize. Major translations of the ''Daodejing'', ''Lunyu'', and works by Wang Chong followed. Romanian writers including Mihail Sadoveanu, Lucian Blaga, and the great religious historian Mircea Eliade engaged creatively with Chinese cultural themes in their fiction and philosophical works.<ref>“Academic Freedom and China,” AAUP report (2024); ''Sinology vs. the Disciplines, Then & Now'', China Heritage (2019).</ref>

=== 3.4 Contemporary Romanian Sinology ===

Since 1989, Romanian sinology has continued through the University of Bucharest programme, the Confucius Institute at the University of Bucharest (established 2007), and the ongoing work of Romanian-trained sinologists. The field has expanded to encompass contemporary China studies, business Chinese, and translation studies, while keeping up its traditional strengths in literary and philosophical research.<ref>“They Don’t Understand the Fear We Have: How China’s Long Reach of Repression Undermines Academic Freedom at Australia’s Universities,” Human Rights Watch (2021).</ref>

== IV. Macedonia ==

=== 4.1 A Young Tradition ===

Sinology in the Republic of Macedonia (since 2019, North Macedonia) is a comparatively recent development, with its first stirrings in 1979. As Sara Cvetanovska has documented, the field is primarily embodied in three areas: translation, literature and philosophy research, and Chinese language education. During the Yugoslav period, the only sinological facility in the federation was the Lectorate for Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Belgrade (established 1974). Macedonia, as a constituent republic, had no Chinese studies programme of its own until after independence.<ref>Kubin, ''Hanxue yanjiu xin shiye'', ch. 7, pp. 100–111.</ref>

=== 4.2 Pioneer Translators ===

The first direct translation from Chinese into Macedonian was accomplished in 1979 by Verka Jovanova-Modanu (莫達努), who had studied in China on a government scholarship from 1973 to 1978. Her translations of Lu Xun’s short stories (1979), a selection of modern Chinese fiction (1983), and Mao Dun’s ''Midnight'' (1984) set high standards for the field. A second generation of translators emerged in the late 1990s: Dr. Chen Siyin-Ilievska, Igor Radev (冯海城), and Sara Cvetanovska (席晓兰) collaborated on a bilingual Chinese-Macedonian edition of the poetry of Lü Yuan for the Struga Poetry Festival (1998). Since 2012, this cohort has produced an impressive output, including translations of Zhang Ailing, Lao Zi’s ''Daodejing'', the ''Lunyu'', the ''Shijing'', Mo Yan, Bei Dao, and classical Chinese poetry and drama.<ref>Thomas Michael, “Heidegger’s Legacy for Comparative Philosophy and the Laozi,” ''International Journal of China Studies'' 11, no. 2 (2020): 299.</ref>

=== 4.3 Institutional Framework ===

The institutional infrastructure supporting Chinese studies in Macedonia has developed incrementally. In 2004, the Chinese language was first taught at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. A House of Chinese Culture opened in the National Library in 2010, which in 2013 was upgraded to a Confucius Institute in partnership with the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. In 2014, Suzana Nedevska founded the first private Chinese language school, “Ni Hao.” More recently, the “16+1” cultural cooperation framework has stimulated publishing activity, with the Skopje publisher Makedonika Litera joining the “16+1 Publishing Association” in 2018. Sara Cvetanovska has also contributed a new transcription standard for Chinese pinyin in the Macedonian Cyrillic script, published by the Institute for Macedonian Language.<ref>Steven Burik, ''The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking: Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism'' (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009).</ref>

== V. Belarus ==

=== 5.1 Early Belarusian Connections to China ===

Belarus, as Darya Nechyparuk has documented, did not exist as an independent state until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its territory belonged successively to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, several scholars born on Belarusian soil made notable contributions to the study of China within the frameworks of these larger polities.<ref>David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, ''Thinking Through Confucius'' (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), preface.</ref>

The earliest identified figure is Osip Kovalevsky, a native of Hrodna (Grodno), who was a distinguished Orientalist and Tibetologist in the first half of the nineteenth century. More significant for sinology was Iosif Goshkevich (1814–1875), born in the Gomel region, who served as a member of the twelfth Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing from 1839 to 1848. During nine years in the Chinese capital, Goshkevich conducted extensive studies of Chinese history, nature, politics, agriculture, and sericulture, publishing articles on topics ranging from Chinese abacus calculation to silk production in the proceedings of the Mission. His work is credited with profoundly shaping later Belarusian understanding of China.<ref>Francois Jullien, ''Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece'' (New York: Zone Books, 2000); cf. “China as Method: Methodological Implications of Francois Jullien’s Philosophical Detour through China,” ''Contemporary French and Francophone Studies'' 28, no. 1 (2024).</ref>

Other early figures include Mikhail Pavlovsky (b. 1885, Mogilev), who published ''Chinese-Russian Relations'' in New York, and the translator Vasyl Panasyuk (b. 1924, Polotsk), who translated Luo Guanzhong’s ''Sanguo Yanyi'', Sima Qian’s selected works, and Cao Xueqin’s ''Honglou Meng'' into Russian, and authored over sixty scholarly articles. The philosopher Vasily Feoktistov (b. 1930, Mogilev) specialised in ancient Chinese philosophy, with particular attention to Xunzi.<ref>Wolfgang Kubin, ''Hanxue yanjiu xin shiye'' (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2013), ch. 11, pp. 194–195.</ref>

=== 5.2 The Soviet Period and Belarusian Interest in China ===

During the 1920s and 1930s, Belarusian scholars began to study Sino-Belarusian relations and Chinese political developments, largely within the framework of Soviet ideological priorities. P. Kogan’s essay “The Great Sun” (on Sun Yat-sen) was the first written treatment of Chinese history produced on Belarusian soil. V. Serbenta’s ''The Chinese Revolution'' (1930) offered a detailed analysis of the revolutionary upheavals. The interwar period, however, was marked by the absence of professional sinologists, and Belarusian sinology did not develop into an independent scholarly discipline.<ref>Bryan W. Van Norden, ''Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).</ref>

=== 5.3 Literary Translations ===

A distinctive contribution of Belarusian culture has been the translation of Chinese poetry and prose into the Belarusian language. The poet Uladzimir Dubouka (b. 1900) was the first to translate Chinese poetry into Belarusian, publishing Du Fu’s poems in the 1950s. The national poet Ryhor Baradulin translated poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu. More recently, the philosopher Ihar Babkou has translated Li Bai. In 2023, Darya Nechyparuk herself translated Shang Gang’s ''A Concise History of Chinese Arts and Crafts'' into Belarusian.<ref>Carine Defoort, “Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy? Arguments of an Implicit Debate,” ''Philosophy East and West'' 51, no. 3 (2001): 393–413.</ref>

Significant anthologies include ''A Century of Acquaintance'' (''Стагоддзе на знаёмства''), collecting Chinese literary works from the era of Qu Yuan to the mid-twentieth century in Belarusian translation; ''Bright Signs: Poets of China'' (''Светлыя знакі: паэты Кітая''), featuring poets from Wang Wei to Xu Zhimo; and ''Petals of Lotus and Chrysanthemum'' (2018), comprising works of one hundred twentieth-century Chinese poets.<ref>Carine Defoort, “‘Chinese Philosophy’ at European Universities: A Threefold Utopia,” ''Dao'' 16, no. 1 (2017): 55–72.</ref>

=== 5.4 Contemporary Chinese Studies in Belarus ===

Today, Belarus hosts six Confucius Institutes, multiple Confucius Classrooms, a Chinese Cultural Centre, and a Sino-Belarusian Friendship Centre. These institutions focus primarily on Chinese language instruction and cultural promotion, with sinology as a research discipline remaining relatively undeveloped. Among contemporary Belarusian scholars who have written on China, Valery Hermenchuk stands out: his book ''China: Wings of the Dragon'' (2017) analyses Western political science assessments of China. Vladimir Dubovik’s ''Belarus and China: On the Road of Comprehensive Cooperation'' (2015) examines bilateral relations from a media perspective. The folklorist Tatiana Shamyakina has published on parallels between the Chinese zodiac and Slavic mythology.<ref>On Korean printing and textual transmission, see the UNESCO Memory of the World inscription for the ''Jikji'' (earliest extant movable metal type printing, 1377); on the Goryeo Tripitaka, see the UNESCO World Heritage inscription.</ref>

== VI. Conclusion: Common Threads and Divergent Paths ==

The sinological traditions of Eastern Europe share certain defining characteristics. In each case, early knowledge of China was mediated by religious or diplomatic missions. The establishment of academic sinology was delayed by the political turbulence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — partition, war, occupation, and ideological conformity. Yet precisely because these nations experienced their own forms of subordination and cultural struggle, their scholars often approached China with a sympathy and openness that differed markedly from the perspectives of the colonial powers. Průšek’s friendship with Lu Xun, Jabłoński’s immersion in Chinese folk culture, Milescu’s diplomatic mission, the Macedonian translators’ devotion to Chinese poetry — all reflect a mode of engagement characterised by genuine intellectual curiosity and a sense of civilisational kinship.

The post-1989 period has brought both opportunities and challenges. The expansion of Chinese language education through Confucius Institutes, the growth of student exchange programmes, and the deepening of economic ties have created new demand for Chinese studies. At the same time, funding constraints, brain drain, and the institutional fragility of small departments threaten the sustainability of the field. The future of Eastern European sinology will depend on the ability of these nations to build upon their remarkable scholarly heritage while adapting to the demands of a rapidly changing world.

== Bibliography ==

Cvetanovska, Sara. “Sinology in Macedonia: A Brief Overview from the Beginnings to 2019.” Unpublished manuscript.

Jabłoński, Witold. “Personal Sentiment and Ritual in the ''Liji''.” Ph.D. diss., University of Warsaw, 1933.

Kajdański, Edward. ''The Envoy of China: Michał Boym''. Trans. Zhang Zhenhui. Zhengzhou: Elephant Press, 2001.

Nechyparuk, Darya. “The Development of Sinology in Belarus” [汉学在白俄罗斯的发展历程]. Unpublished manuscript, Xi’an International Studies University.

Průšek, Jaroslav. ''Chinese History and Literature''. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1970.

Zhang Xiping 张西平. ''Xifang Hanxue Shiliu Jiang'' 西方汉学十六讲. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2011. Lectures 11–13.

== References ==
<references />

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