Book Roads and Routes

Chinese texts travelled in extraordinary quantities to distant parts of East Asia, and this chapter charts the movements of books. Most of the movement was centripetal, from China to neighbouring societies, and rather than being foisted on neighbouring societies Chinese books were instead actively sought and taken home by envoys, monks, and other travellers. The flow of books continued right up to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Chinese accounts of the Opium War and of the power of Western countries reached Japan and Korea. Small numbers of books were taken from neighbouring societies to China or to other neighbouring societies, the most important case being the seizure of many books from Korea by the Japanese forces which invaded the Korean peninsula in the last decade of the sixteenth century. For the most part, though, East Asian societies apart from China were receivers rather than transmitters.