NEWS

2021.07.19

The 34th AJI Frontier Seminar on “Cultural Exchange in East Asia through Chinese Classical Books: A Case Study of the Circulation of Poetry Collections during the Thirteenth to Seventeenth Centuries”

On July 13, the 34th AJI Research Frontiers Seminar took place online. Dr. Chunyu Jin (Research Fellow of the Asia-Japan Research Institute, Ritsumeikan University) made a historically well-informed presentation under the title of “Cultural Exchange in Easy Asia through Chinese Classical Books: A Case Study of the Circulation of Poetry Collections during the Thirteenth to Seventeenth Centuries”. In her research, Dr. Jin has been seeking to unravel the long-term historical process from the Tang Dynasty of China to the modern period, in which Chinese classical books spread to Asian countries such as Korea, Japan and Vietnam and also returned to China.

She pointed out the problem that few studies exist on cultural exchanges of popular poetry and literature, that is, the Collections in contrast to the Classics, Historical literary works and Art masterpieces, which have accumulated a lot of researches. Starting with this problem, Dr. Jin focused on the collections of poems from the Ming Dynasty in China as a main example. She showed, with a fruitful analysis of historical materials, how poetic works from this age were compiled and published in Japan and circulated back to China, which formed a regional network of literature in the long run. In the Q&A session, Dr. Jin and participants discussed several issues such as why few researches on the Collections have been conducted, and why Japanese collectors actively accepted many works from the Collections.

Dr. Jin delivering her presentation