Dinara Dubrovskaya: Forty Years in Oriental Studies. Part II

This is the second part of an interview with a Sinologist, art historian, journalist and writer Dr Dinara V. Dubrovskaya, editor-in-chief of the Vostochnyi Courier (Oriental Courier) magazine, who in 2022 headed the Department of Art and Material Culture of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The conversation raises key issues related to the self-representation and self-awareness of Chinese civilization, the issues of interaction of the Middle Kingdom with its immediate neighbors and with the world in general in historical retrospective and in modern times. The author and the interviewer look into the reasons why the Chinese empires were not interested in spreading their teachings beyond the borders of the Celestial Empire and in the very concept of ‘frontiers’ in the understanding of the traditional Chinese. We are talking about the self-sufficiency of Chinese culture — true as well as supposed, about the concept of ‘devouring a mulberry leaf’, comparing the understanding of the contact zones of the ancient Chinese and ancient Egyptian states.