History of Sinology/Chapter 19

EN · DE · 中文 · 正體 · FR · ES · RU

Previous◀ Chapter 18

History_of_Sinology

NextChapter 20 ▶

Chapter 19: East Asia — Sinology in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam

1. Japan: Kangaku — The Oldest Continuous Tradition of Chinese Studies outside China

Japan possesses the oldest continuous tradition of Chinese studies outside China itself. For more than a millennium, educated Japanese have studied the Chinese language, read Chinese literature, absorbed Chinese philosophy, and produced scholarship on Chinese civilisation that, at its best, has rivalled or surpassed the work of Western sinologists. This tradition — known as kangaku (漢学, literally “Han learning” or “Chinese learning”) — has no parallel in any other country. When European scholars were only beginning to decipher Chinese characters in the seventeenth century, Japanese scholars had been reading, commenting upon, and debating the Chinese classics for over a thousand years.

Yet the history of Japanese sinology is not simply a story of continuous absorption. At every stage, the Japanese encounter with Chinese learning has been shaped by a tension between reception and resistance, between the prestige of Chinese civilisation and the assertion of a distinctive Japanese identity. This tension has generated a series of changes — from the court-centred classical studies of the Heian period, through the Confucian academies of the Tokugawa era, to the modern university-based discipline of Chūgoku-gaku (中国学, “Chinese studies”) — that make the Japanese case uniquely instructive for any comparative history of sinology.

1.1 Pre-Modern Foundations

The transmission of Chinese writing to Japan is traditionally dated to the fifth century CE, when Korean scholars — particularly the semi-legendary figure Wani (王仁) — are said to have brought the Lunyu and the Qianzi wen to the Japanese court. By the seventh century, the Japanese state had adopted the Chinese writing system, Chinese administrative institutions, Chinese legal codes, and Chinese Buddhist practices on a massive scale. The Taika reforms of 645–650 and the subsequent Ritsuryō codes were modelled directly on Tang-dynasty Chinese prototypes.

The Man’yōshū (万葉集, c. 759), the oldest extant collection of Japanese poetry, was written using Chinese characters adapted to represent Japanese sounds — a system later known as man’yōgana. The development of the native Japanese scripts hiragana and katakana from cursive and abbreviated forms of Chinese characters in the ninth century enabled the creation of a distinctive Japanese literary culture, but classical Chinese (kanbun) remained the language of government, scholarship, and high culture for many centuries thereafter. As late as the Meiji period, educated Japanese were expected to be able to read and compose in classical Chinese, much as educated Europeans were expected to command Latin.

During the Heian period (794–1185), the Japanese court maintained a Daigaku-ryō (大学寮, “University Bureau”) that offered instruction in Chinese classics, Chinese law, Chinese history, and Chinese literature. The curriculum was modelled on the Tang-dynasty educational system and centred on the Confucian Five Classics and the Wenxuan (文選), the great Chinese literary anthology compiled by Xiao Tong. The medieval period (twelfth–sixteenth centuries) saw the arrival of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, which brought a new wave of Chinese cultural influence. Zen monks maintained close contacts with Song and Yuan China, and the gozan (五山, “Five Mountains”) Zen monasteries became centres of Chinese learning, producing a substantial body of Chinese-language poetry and prose known as gozan bungaku (五山文学). These monasteries also served as conduits for the transmission of Song Neo-Confucian philosophy, which would become the dominant intellectual system of the Tokugawa period.

1.2 Tokugawa-Era Confucian Schools: The Golden Age of Kangaku

The Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) adopted Neo-Confucianism — specifically the philosophy of Zhu Xi (朱子学, Shushigaku) — as the ideological foundation of the regime. Confucian principles of hierarchical order, filial piety, and loyalty to one’s lord provided a philosophical justification for the rigid social stratification of Tokugawa society, in which the samurai class monopolised political power and the peasantry was bound to the land.

The shogunate’s premier Confucian educational institution was the Shōheikō (昌平黌), originally the private academy of the Hayashi family of Confucian scholars, which was taken under direct shogunal control in 1790 and became, in effect, a state university for the training of samurai officials. The Shōheikō’s curriculum centred on the close reading of the Chinese Confucian classics in kanbun — the Japanese reading of classical Chinese texts, in which the word order of the Chinese original is rearranged to conform to Japanese syntax through a system of diacritical marks (kundoku 訓読). This method, developed over many centuries, enabled educated Japanese to access the entire corpus of Chinese classical literature without learning to speak Chinese.

Beyond the Shōheikō, each of the roughly 250 feudal domains (han) maintained its own school (hankō 藩校) for the education of samurai youth, with curricula overwhelmingly focused on the Neo-Confucian canon. By the end of the Tokugawa period, there were approximately 270 domain schools in operation across Japan. Private academies (juku 塾) supplemented the domain schools, and many of the most original intellectual developments of the Tokugawa period occurred in these less regulated institutions. The most famous was the Kaitokudō (懐徳堂) in Osaka, a merchant-sponsored academy where Confucian ethics were applied to the problems of commercial life. The Kangien (咸宜園), founded by the Confucian scholar Hirose Tansō in 1817, attracted students from across Japan and insisted that all students, regardless of social rank, should study Chinese classics. Shōka Sonjuku (松下村塾), the private school of the radical Confucian Yoshida Shōin, trained many of the future leaders of the Meiji Restoration.

The fashion of sinological study extended beyond the samurai elite. Private institutions (terakoya 寺子屋, temple schools) offered basic instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic to commoners, and the prestige of Chinese learning was such that even farmers and merchants sought exposure to Chinese texts. By the end of the Tokugawa period, Japan possessed what was, by any standard, the most highly literate society in the pre-industrial world, and classical Chinese was the foundation of that literacy.

The intellectual vitality of Tokugawa kangaku was expressed in the competition among rival schools of Confucian thought. The dominant Zhu Xi school (Shushigaku) was challenged by the Wang Yangming school (Yōmeigaku 陽明学), which emphasised the unity of knowledge and action. The “Ancient Learning” (Kogaku 古学) movement, represented by Itō Jinsai (1627–1705) and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), rejected both Zhu Xi’s and Wang Yangming’s interpretations and insisted on returning directly to the original texts of Confucius and Mencius. Sorai, who advocated reading the Chinese classics in the original Chinese rather than through kanbun reading, was the most radical philological innovator of the Tokugawa period and has been compared to the European humanists who insisted on reading Greek and Latin texts in the original rather than through medieval commentaries. The Kokugaku (国学, “National Learning”) movement, which emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction against the dominance of Chinese learning, sought to recover what its proponents regarded as the authentic spirit of Japanese culture, free from Chinese influence. Scholars such as Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) devoted themselves to ancient Japanese texts and argued that the emotional spontaneity and aesthetic sensitivity of Japanese culture were superior to the rationalistic moralism of Confucianism. The tension between kangaku and kokugaku thus mirrored, in a different cultural register, the tension between sinology and national studies that would later emerge in other East Asian countries.

1.3 The Meiji Transformation and Modern Academic Sinology

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the subsequent programme of rapid Westernisation transformed every aspect of Japanese society, including the study of China. The domain schools and the Shōheikō were abolished. Western-style universities were established: Tokyo Imperial University (1877), Kyoto Imperial University (1897). The old Confucian curriculum was replaced by a Western model of academic disciplines. The study of China, hitherto central to Japanese intellectual life, was marginalised as Japan reoriented itself toward the West.

Yet the transformation was not simply a story of decline. The Meiji period also witnessed the emergence of modern academic sinology, which adopted Western methods of historical and philological analysis while drawing on the deep reservoir of Chinese learning that kangaku had built up over centuries. The new discipline was initially called shinagaku (支那学, “China studies”), a term that would later be abandoned in favour of Chūgoku-gaku (中国学) or Tōyōshi (東洋史, “Oriental History”) after the word Shina acquired pejorative connotations during the period of Japanese imperialism.

The modern academic study of Chinese history in Japan was pioneered by Shiratori Kurakichi (白鳥庫吉, 1865–1942), who became professor at Tokyo Imperial University and established the discipline of Tōyōshi. Shiratori had studied under Ludwig Riess, a student of Leopold von Ranke, and he applied Rankean methods of source criticism to the study of East Asian history. His approach was characterised by scepticism toward traditional Chinese historical narratives, an emphasis on the interactions between China and the nomadic peoples of the steppe, and a concern with the practical applications of historical knowledge. By 1916, Shiratori had trained a large cohort of future scholars, establishing what became known as the “Tokyo school” of sinology, with its emphasis on critical method and its orientation toward the social and political history of modern China.

1.4 Naitō Konan and the Kyoto School

Naitō Torajirō (内藤虎次郎, 1866–1934), universally known by his pen name Naitō Konan, was the founder of the Kyoto school of historiography and one of the most influential sinologists of the twentieth century, East or West. A journalist for twenty years in the vibrant Meiji press, Naitō became recognised as Japan’s leading commentator on China before entering academia. In 1907, he was invited to Kyoto Imperial University, where he assumed a chair in Chinese studies and taught for twenty years.

Naitō’s most influential contribution was his periodisation of Chinese history, which posited the transition from late Tang through Northern Song as the decisive watershed in Chinese civilisation — the moment at which China entered “modernity” (kinsei 近世). This thesis challenged both the traditional Chinese view that each dynasty constituted a self-contained unit and the Western assumption that modernity was a uniquely European phenomenon. Naitō argued that the social, economic, and cultural changes of the Song period — the rise of a commercialised economy, the expansion of printing, the emergence of a new gentry class, the development of Neo-Confucian philosophy — represented a transition to early modernity that preceded comparable developments in Europe by several centuries.

The “Tang-Song transition thesis” became one of the most debated propositions in the historiography of East Asia. It influenced Western sinology profoundly, shaping the work of scholars such as Robert Hartwell, Peter Bol, and Robert Hymes. It also generated sharp controversy: critics objected that Naitō’s periodisation was Eurocentric in its assumptions and that it served to justify Japan’s self-appointed mission to “modernise” China — a position that resonated uncomfortably with Japanese imperialism.

The Kyoto school, as shaped by Naitō and his successors, was distinguished from the Tokyo school by several features: a greater emphasis on cultural and intellectual history (as opposed to political and military history); a deeper engagement with Chinese sources and the Chinese scholarly tradition; a more sympathetic attitude toward Chinese civilisation as an autonomous entity with its own logic of development; and a tendency toward ambitious historical synthesis rather than narrow specialisation. In many respects, the Kyoto school was the Japanese counterpart of the French sinological tradition represented by Chavannes, Maspero, and Gernet.

Miyazaki Ichisada (宮崎市定, 1901–1995), the most distinguished representative of the second generation, developed Naitō’s thesis further, producing studies of the Chinese examination system (Kakyo: Chūgoku no shiken jigoku, 1976), the Nine Ranks bureaucratic system, and the social and economic history of the Song dynasty. His scholarship was recognised internationally: he received the Japan Academy Prize (1958) and, in 1978, the Prix Stanislas Julien from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris — the same prize that had been awarded to Karlgren, Forke, and Legge, and one of the highest honours in international sinology.

1.5 Post-War Japanese Sinology

Japan’s defeat in 1945 provoked a profound crisis in Japanese sinology. The field’s association with wartime imperialism — the notion, implicit in the Kyoto school’s work, that Japan was destined to lead the “modernisation” of Asia — required a painful reckoning. Some scholars, notably Takeuchi Yoshimi (竹内好, 1910–1977), argued for a radical reconstruction of Japan’s approach to China. Takeuchi, who had founded the Chinese Literature Research Society (Chūgoku Bungaku Kenkyūkai) in 1934, advocated for the study of contemporary Chinese literature and thought as a way of confronting Japan’s wartime complicity. His intellectual engagement with Lu Xun was central to this project: Takeuchi saw in Lu Xun a model of the modern Asian intellectual who refused both uncritical Westernisation and nostalgic traditionalism.

Others, notably the classical scholar Yoshikawa Kōjirō (吉川幸次郎, 1904–1980), continued the philological tradition of the Kyoto school while making quiet but significant revisions to their wartime positions. When reprinting his earlier works, Yoshikawa extensively altered passages that had accommodated the wartime ideology of Pan-Asian solidarity. The debate between Takeuchi and Yoshikawa — between what one scholar characterised as the “pain of passion” and the “calmness of the sinologist’s bystanding” — defined the intellectual climate of post-war Japanese sinology.

Post-war Japan developed an institutional infrastructure for Chinese studies that was among the most extensive in the world. The major universities — Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Tohoku, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Waseda, Keio — all maintained departments of Chinese literature, Chinese history, or Oriental studies. The Research Institute for Humanistic Studies (Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo) at Kyoto University became a world-renowned centre for collaborative research on Chinese history and culture. Major journals — Tōhō Gakuhō (東方学報, Kyoto), Tōyōshi Kenkyū (東洋史研究), Shigaku Zasshi (史学雑誌, Tokyo) — published scholarship that met or exceeded Western standards of philological rigour. The normalisation of Sino-Japanese relations in 1972 opened new opportunities for scholarly exchange, and Japanese sinologists were among the first foreign scholars to gain access to Chinese archives and archaeological sites after the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Contemporary Japanese sinology is characterised by a productive tension between the classical philological tradition inherited from kangaku and modern approaches drawn from the social sciences, literary theory, and cultural studies. Japanese scholars continue to make major contributions to the study of Chinese classical literature, ancient Chinese history, Chinese philosophy, and Chinese art. The field faces challenges common to humanistic disciplines worldwide — declining student enrolments, pressure for “relevance,” the marginalisation of classical languages — but it retains a depth of expertise and a tradition of meticulous scholarship that few other national traditions can match.

2. Korea: The Confucian Heritage

2.1 Classical Chinese in Korean Intellectual Life

Korea’s engagement with Chinese learning is almost as old as Japan’s and, in certain respects, even deeper. From the adoption of Chinese writing in the early centuries of the Common Era through the establishment of the Confucian examination system in the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) and its elaboration under the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), classical Chinese was the language of government, scholarship, and high culture in Korea for well over a millennium. The Joseon dynasty, which adopted Neo-Confucianism as the state ideology with a rigour unmatched even in China, created what was arguably the most thoroughly Confucianised society in East Asian history.

The Korean civil service examination (gwageo 科挙), modelled on the Chinese imperial examination, was established in 958 during the Goryeo dynasty and continued with modifications throughout the Joseon period until its abolition in 1894. The examinations tested candidates’ ability to interpret the Chinese classics from an orthodox Neo-Confucian perspective, and success was the principal route to social advancement. The system generated an intense demand for Chinese classical education that pervaded every level of Korean society.

The most distinctive Korean institution for the study of Chinese classics was the seowon (書院), the private Confucian academy that combined the functions of a shrine and a school. Modelled on the Chinese shuyuan, the first Korean seowon — the Sosu Seowon — was established in 1543. By the eighteenth century, there were over 670 seowon in operation across Korea, serving as centres for the study of Neo-Confucian philosophy, venues for the veneration of Confucian sages, and social hubs for the yangban aristocratic class. In 2019, nine Korean seowon were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. At the apex of the Joseon educational system stood the Sungkyunkwan (成均館), the national Confucian academy in Seoul. Together with provincial hyanggyo (county schools) and the seowon, it constituted a comprehensive educational infrastructure devoted almost entirely to the mastery of Chinese classical learning.

2.2 The Korean Contribution to Chinese Classical Scholarship

Korean scholars did not merely absorb Chinese learning; they also made original contributions to the study of Chinese texts that deserve recognition in any history of sinology. The greatest Joseon Neo-Confucian thinkers — Yi Hwang (李滉, 1501–1570, known as Toegye) and Yi I (李珥, 1536–1584, known as Yulgok) — engaged deeply with the philosophy of Zhu Xi and produced original interpretations that carried Chinese thought in new directions. The “Four-Seven Debate” (Sachil nonjaeng) between Toegye and his contemporary Ki Daeseung over the relationship between Zhu Xi’s concepts of li (principle) and qi (material force) was one of the most sustained and rigorous philosophical debates in the history of East Asian thought, demonstrating that Korean scholars were active interlocutors who could extend and challenge the Chinese tradition from within.

The Silhak (實學, “Practical Learning”) movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represented a further challenge to the dominant Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. Silhak scholars such as Yi Ik (1681–1763) and Jeong Yagyong (丁若鏞, 1762–1836, known as Dasan) advocated for a more empirical, practically oriented scholarship that drew on a wider range of Chinese sources, including the kaozheng (evidential scholarship) tradition that was simultaneously reshaping Chinese scholarship under the Qing. Jeong Yagyong’s voluminous commentaries on the Chinese classics, particularly his studies of the Yijing, the Shijing, and the Chunqiu, represented Korean classical scholarship at its most original and rigorous.

Korea also played a notable role in the preservation and transmission of Chinese texts. Korean printing, which adopted movable metal type as early as 1234 — two centuries before Gutenberg — produced editions of Chinese classics that sometimes preserved readings lost in Chinese editions. The Goryeo Tripitaka (Palmandaejanggyeong), carved on over 80,000 wooden printing blocks between 1237 and 1248, is the most complete and oldest surviving edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon. Korean libraries preserved Chinese texts that were destroyed or lost in China itself, particularly during the turbulent Ming-Qing transition and the Qianlong Emperor’s literary inquisition.

Korean scholars not only studied Chinese literature but also composed in classical Chinese at the highest level. The collected works of the Goryeo-era writer Yi Gyubo (1168–1241) contain Chinese-language poetry and prose that earned the admiration of Chinese scholars. During the Joseon period, Korean hansi (漢詩, Chinese-language poetry) reached its zenith with figures such as Heo Gyun (1569–1618) and Pak Jiwon (1737–1805), who employed Chinese literary forms to explore distinctively Korean themes. Korean scholars also produced commentaries and critical editions of Chinese texts that sometimes exceeded their Chinese models in rigour, and the Joseon court mobilised its metal movable type to produce editions of Chinese classics distributed to schools and libraries across the country.

2.3 Modern Korean Sinology

Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and the subsequent colonial period (1910–1945) had a complex impact on Korean sinology. The colonial authorities suppressed Korean language and culture and attempted to assimilate Korean scholarship into the framework of Japanese Tōyōshi. At the same time, the colonial period exposed Korean scholars to modern academic methods — including the critical historical method of the Tokyo and Kyoto schools — and created new institutional frameworks for the study of Chinese history and culture. The term kangaku itself became contested, and the cooperation between Japanese and Korean scholars of the Chinese classics has been described as “colonial collaboration” — intellectually productive yet politically fraught.

After liberation in 1945 and the division of the peninsula, South Korean sinology developed rapidly. Major universities — Seoul National University, Korea University, Yonsei University, and Sungkyunkwan University (which traces its institutional lineage to the Joseon-era academy) — established departments of Chinese language, Chinese literature, and Chinese history. Significant growth in the field occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. Korean historians of China, drawing on their nation’s deep familiarity with the Chinese classical tradition, made contributions to the study of Chinese social and economic history, particularly of the Song, Ming, and Qing periods, and have been particularly active in the study of Sino-Korean relations, the transmission of Confucianism, and the comparative history of East Asian civilisations.

Korean sinology occupies a position distinct from both Western and Japanese sinology. Like Japan, Korea possesses a deep indigenous tradition of Chinese classical scholarship that predates the modern academic discipline. Unlike Japan, however, Korea never had an imperial relationship with China of the kind that makes Japanese sinology potentially complicit in a discourse of cultural domination. Korean scholars’ relationship with Chinese culture has been characterised by a combination of profound reverence for the Confucian tradition and a persistent assertion of Korean distinctiveness within it — what one scholar has called the “reception, curation, and reinvention of cultural knowledge from China.” The creation of the Korean alphabet hangul by King Sejong the Great in 1443 — one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of writing — was itself an assertion of Korean linguistic independence, though the use of hangul for scholarly purposes was long resisted by the Confucian elite, who regarded classical Chinese as the only proper medium for serious thought.

3. Vietnam: The Sino-Vietnamese Tradition

3.1 A Millennium of Chinese Rule and Its Legacy

Vietnam’s relationship with Chinese civilisation is the most intimate of any country surveyed in this volume, with the possible exception of Korea. Ruled by China for over a millennium — from 111 BCE, when the Han dynasty conquered the kingdom of Nanyue, to 939 CE, when Ngô Quyền defeated the Southern Han and established Vietnamese independence — Vietnam absorbed Chinese administrative institutions, Chinese legal codes, Chinese writing, and Chinese learning on a scale that left an indelible mark on its culture.

Even after achieving independence, the Vietnamese state continued to use classical Chinese (chữ Hán, 字漢) as its official written language. Court documents, legal codes, historical records, diplomatic correspondence, and scholarly works were composed in Chinese for nearly a thousand years after independence. The Confucian examination system, the state religion of Confucianism, the Chinese-style bureaucracy, and the Chinese classical curriculum all persisted, creating what scholars have described as a “Sinicised” state in which the institutions and values of Chinese civilisation were adopted and adapted to Vietnamese conditions.

3.2 The Confucian Examinations and Chữ Nôm

Vietnam established its own Confucian court examination system in 1075, during the Lý dynasty. In 1070, the Lý dynasty founded the Temple of Literature (Văn Miếu) in Thăng Long (present-day Hanoi) as a state temple dedicated to Confucius, and in 1076 established the Imperial Academy (Quốc Tử Giám). The examinations evaluated candidates’ understanding of ethical and political principles in the Confucian classics through forms including kinh nghĩa (exegesis of the classics), thơ-phú (regulated verse and rhapsodic prose), chế-chiếu-biểu (edicts and memorials), and văn sách (policy essays). The Four Books and Five Classics constituted the core curriculum, studied in Chinese and interpreted through Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian commentaries.

The examination system had a profound impact on Vietnamese society, creating a meritocratic ideal that tempered the dominance of the aristocratic class and ensuring the continued centrality of classical Chinese in Vietnamese intellectual life. The stelae at the Temple of Literature, recording the names and achievements of examination graduates from 1442 onward, testify to the prestige that examination success conferred. Vietnam holds the distinction of being the last country to conduct Confucian civil service examinations: the French colonial authorities suspended them in 1913 in Tonkin and 1918–1919 in Annam, ending a tradition that had lasted over eight centuries.

Although classical Chinese was the language of government and scholarship, Vietnam also developed its own writing system for the vernacular: chữ Nôm (字喃, “southern script”). Originating probably in the tenth century, chữ Nôm used Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and created new characters using various methods to represent native Vietnamese words. The relationship between chữ Hán and chữ Nôm mirrors the relationship between kanbun and kana in Japan and between hanmun and hangul in Korea. The greatest work of Vietnamese literature — Nguyễn Du’s Truyện Kiều (The Tale of Kiều, c. 1820), a 3,254-line narrative poem adapting a Chinese novel into Vietnamese verse — was composed in chữ Nôm, exemplifying the creative tension between Chinese and Vietnamese literary traditions.

The introduction of chữ Quốc ngữ — the romanised Vietnamese script developed by Portuguese and French missionaries in the seventeenth century — gradually displaced both chữ Hán and chữ Nôm. Today, fewer than a hundred scholars worldwide can read chữ Nôm fluently. In 1970, the Chữ Nôm Institute (Viện Nghiên cứu Hán Nôm) was established in Hanoi to find, store, translate, and publish the chữ Nôm heritage. To date, it has collected over 20,000 ancient books, most written in chữ Nôm or chữ Hán. The preservation and study of this vast corpus — which constitutes the bulk of Vietnam’s pre-modern literary and historical patrimony — is one of the most pressing tasks facing Vietnamese sinology today.

3.3 Vietnamese Scholars and the EFEO

Despite Vietnam’s smaller size relative to China, Japan, and Korea, Vietnamese scholars made significant contributions to the study of Chinese classical texts. The Lê dynasty scholar Lê Quý Đôn (1726–1784), often called “Vietnam’s greatest polymath,” produced extensive commentaries on Chinese philosophical and historical texts and compiled the Vân Đài Loại Ngữ, an encyclopaedic work modelled on Chinese leishu that synthesised Chinese and Vietnamese learning. His contemporary Nguyễn Thiếp was tasked with reforming the civil service examinations and translating Chinese classics into vernacular Vietnamese (Nôm) for wider dissemination — an early attempt at what might be called the democratisation of Confucian learning. The Temple of Literature in Hanoi, which has functioned continuously since 1070, stands today as a physical testament to Vietnam’s engagement with Chinese classical learning; its eighty-two stone stelae were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2010.

The École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), headquartered in Hanoi from its founding in 1898 until 1957, played a decisive role in the development of Vietnamese sinology. French scholars at the EFEO — including Louis Finot, Henri Maspero (during his years in Hanoi, 1908–1920), Paul Mus, and Émile Gaspardone — conducted foundational research on Vietnamese history, epigraphy, and linguistics that drew extensively on Chinese-language sources. The EFEO’s library built up one of the finest collections of Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese texts in Southeast Asia, and the Institute trained a generation of Vietnamese scholars in modern critical methods.

3.4 Modern Vietnamese Chinese Studies

Modern sinology in Vietnam emerged during French colonial rule (1858–1954), as Western learning came to replace the traditional curriculum of the Confucian classics. After the partition of Vietnam in 1954 and reunification in 1975, Chinese studies followed the trajectory of a socialist state. Marxist-Leninist ideology shaped the interpretation of Chinese history, and the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979 created a political climate in which the study of China was both strategically important and politically sensitive.

Since the normalisation of Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1991 and Vietnam’s adoption of đổi mới (renovation) policies, Vietnamese sinology has experienced a revival. The Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, the Vietnam National University in Hanoi, and other institutions have expanded their programmes in Chinese studies. The re-establishment of scholarly exchanges with China, the growth of Chinese language instruction, and the increasing economic importance of the Sino-Vietnamese relationship have all contributed to renewed interest in Chinese culture and history.

Vietnamese sinology shares certain features with Korean sinology — both grew out of a deep engagement with Chinese civilisation that predates the modern academic discipline, both were shaped by colonialism, and both have been characterised by a tension between reverence for the Chinese classical heritage and assertion of national distinctiveness. Yet Vietnamese sinology is also unique. The depth and duration of direct Chinese political control — over a thousand years — has no parallel. The loss of Chinese-character literacy in the twentieth century has created a radical discontinuity: Vietnamese scholars today must learn to read Chinese characters as a foreign script, even though their ancestors used them as a matter of course. And the survival of over 20,000 books in chữ Nôm and chữ Hán at the Hán Nôm Institute represents both a scholarly treasure and a formidable challenge, since the vast majority of these texts have never been translated, catalogued, or studied with modern critical methods.

4. Conclusion: East Asian Sinology in Comparative Perspective

The sinological traditions of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam share a common origin in the cultural influence of Chinese civilisation, but they have developed in strikingly different ways. Japan’s tradition is the most extensive and institutionally well-established, sustained by a network of universities, research institutes, and journals that rivals any in the world. Korea’s tradition, though less well known internationally, draws on a remarkably deep engagement with Confucian thought that produced some of the most original philosophical work in the history of East Asian civilisation. Vietnam’s tradition, disrupted by colonialism and the loss of character literacy, faces the most urgent challenges of preservation and recovery.

All three traditions challenge the implicit assumption of much Western sinology that the study of China is a Western enterprise. Long before Rémusat held his first lecture at the Collège de France, Japanese scholars had been reading, commenting upon, and debating the Chinese classics for a thousand years. Long before European missionaries compiled their first Chinese-Latin dictionaries, Korean scholars had produced movable-type editions of Chinese Buddhist texts. And long before Chavannes translated the Shiji, Vietnamese scholars had been composing in classical Chinese as the official language of their state. Any history of sinology must reckon with these traditions — not as appendages to the Western story, but as autonomous and, in many cases, older and deeper engagements with Chinese civilisation.

The question of whether these East Asian traditions should be classified as “sinology” at all has generated considerable debate. In Japan, the term kangaku refers specifically to the pre-modern tradition of Chinese learning, while the modern discipline is designated Chūgoku-gaku or Tōyōshi. In Korea and Vietnam, the classical tradition of Chinese learning is so deeply woven into national culture that it resists characterisation as a “foreign” discipline studying an “other” civilisation. When a Korean scholar reads the Lunyu in classical Chinese, she is not engaging with a foreign text in the way that a French or American sinologist is; she is reading a text that her ancestors studied, memorised, and debated for five centuries, in a language that was the medium of her nation’s government, law, and high culture for over a millennium. The implications of this difference for the practice and self-understanding of sinology are profound and have yet to be fully explored.

The relationship between East Asian and Western sinology has been complex and, in recent decades, increasingly productive. Japanese scholarship on Chinese history, in particular, has exercised a growing influence on Western sinology, mediated by scholars such as Joshua Fogel, who has devoted much of his career to translating and contextualising Japanese sinological work for English-speaking audiences. The integration of East Asian and Western perspectives remains one of the most promising — and most demanding — tasks facing the field today.

References

Previous◀ Chapter 18

History_of_Sinology

NextChapter 20 ▶