Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia - not only China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but also societies that no longer exist, such as the Tangut and Khitan empires. Peter Kornicki takes the reader from the early centuries of the common era, when the Chinese script was the only form of writing and Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and medical texts spread throughout East Asia, through the centuries when vernacular scripts evolved, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when nationalism created new roles for vernacular languages and vernacular scripts. Through an examination of oral approaches to Chinese texts, it shows how highly-valued Chinese texts came to be read through the prism of the vernaculars and ultimately to be translated. This long process has some parallels with vernacularization in Europe, but a crucial difference is that literary Chinese was, unlike Latin, not a spoken language. As a consequence, people who spoke different East Asian vernaculars had no means of communicating in speech, but they could communicate silently by means of written conversation in literary Chinese; a further consequence is that within each society Chinese texts assumed vernacular garb: in classes and lectures, Chinese texts were read and declaimed in the vernaculars. What happened in the nineteenth century and why are there still so many different scripts in East Asia? How and why were Chinese texts dethroned, and what replaced them? These are some of the questions addressed in Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia.

"The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science provides an outstanding resource in 33 published volumes with 2 helpful indexes. This thorough reference set--written by 1300 eminent, international experts--offers librarians, information/computer scientists, bibliographers, documentalists, systems analysts, and students, convenient access to the techniques and tools of both library and information science. Impeccably researched, cross referenced, alphabetized by subject, and generously illustrated, the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science integrates the essential theoretical and practical information accumulating in this rapidly growing field."

An indispensable tool for librarians who do reference or collection management, this work is a pioneering offering of expertly selected print and electronic reference tools for East Asian Studies (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). Handbook for Asian Studies Specialists: A Guide to Research Materials and Collection Building Tools is the first work to cover reference works for the main Asian area languages of China, Japan, and Korea. Several leading Asian Studies librarians have contributed their many decades of experience to create a resource that gathers major reference titles—both print and online—that would be useful to today's Asian Studies librarian. Organized by language group, it offers useful information on the many subscription-based and open-source electronic tools relevant to Asian Studies. This book will serve as an essential resource for reference collections at academic libraries. Previously published bibliographies on materials deal with China or Japan or Korea, but none have coalesced information on all three countries into one work, or are written in English. And unlike the other resources available, this work provides the insight needed for librarians to make informed collection management decisions and reference selections.

This essay is the work of a social anthropologist but it is not based upon field work. It is concerned with Chinese matters but it is not written by a sinologue. In this essay are the author’s reflections on certain aspects of southeastern Chinese society during the last hundred and fifty years, with attention on the Fukien and Kwangtung region of China has it has specialized not only in large-scale unilineal organization but also in sending people overseas.