About the Centre

Why "East Asian Cultures"?

There is a strong intellectual case for expanding the integrated study of East Asia in the pre-modern period. In an age of tensions and inequalities between different regions of the world, modern East Asia – Greater China, Japan, and Korea – is establishing a powerful economic and political presence. A proper understanding of the rise of East Asia today needs to be based on a thorough knowledge of its past. The contemporary prominence of East Asia seems less surprising when viewed against the past, when the region matched or surpassed the Europe-based “Western” civilization of the last millennium and a half in the size of its economy, technological progress, and cultural output, right up until the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Historically, what we now think of as the continent of “Asia” had no such name, nor was there any concept of a common identity among the people who lived there. A meaningful regional identity of a sort did exist in what we now know as East Asia – China, Japan, Korea, and including also Vietnam – linked through the use of Chinese characters, or writing systems based on them, and through education in canonical texts in a common literary language, Classical Chinese, which served a function similar to that of Latin in Europe. Links existed at a very different level through the high volume of trade which developed between the countries of East Asia, and which plugged into larger trade networks connecting with the rest of the world.

Elite literate cultures in these countries in their different ways mastered an educational syllabus derived from the Classical Chinese textual canon and the practices, values, and discourses that we generally characterize as “Confucian”. East Asian forms of Buddhism constituted another pan-regional tradition based on texts in Classical Chinese, which also underlay systems of literate education, a tradition with an even greater reach, linked to the civilisations in South, Central, and Southeast Asia. These traditional systems remain influential today in culture, language, and ethical values, even when they have been explicitly rejected in drives to modernize. This overall East Asian culture, though superficially similar throughout the region at elite level, masks significantly different local cultures, each of which had expressions and identities of their own, even when framed in the discourse of the shared culture. 

A comprehensive understanding of pre-modern East Asia thus requires detailed research on both the shared pan-regional culture and the diversity within the apparent commonality. Such research is no mere antiquarian exercise. The traditional cultures of the four countries (or modern adaptations of them) still form an important part of their respective national identities, influencing modern politics (witness Xi Jinping’s promotion of Confucianism in support of the moral and ideological renewal of Marxism in China), and underlying lingering tensions between East Asian countries (Hideyoshi’s invasions of the Korean Peninsula in the 1590s remain in the Korean consciousness of Koreans today). 

The Centre has been created primarily to promote the study of pre-modern East Asia, but we chose not to put ‘pre-modern’ or ‘traditional’ in the name. This is because we do not wish to exclude study of the modern period when it so often links to the past. Pre-modern research is directly relevant to, and essential for, the study of how modern East Asia has taken shape.

By calling it the “Research Centre for East Asian Cultures” we wish to signal that its mission is the study of East Asian cultures from a historical perspective, primarily through the various humanities disciplines. The Centre is based in St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, and is intended to facilitate research on East Asia not just in Oxford, but throughout the world, through conferences and seminars, and publications.

East Asian Studies in Oxford 

Oxford has traditionally been strong in pre-modern East Asian studies, particularly Chinese and Classical Chinese language, since the appointment of James Legge, the first Professor of Chinese, in 1876. It remains one of the leading institutions in the Western world for the study of Classical Chinese language and texts. Close links between regional specialists in the Oriental Institute have been a particular asset (the Japan intellectual historian James McMullen is a world authority on Japanese Confucianism, which he studied in large part through texts in kanbun, the Japanese form of Classical Chinese). The two-year MPhil degree in Traditional East Asia in the Oriental Studies Faculty is run by the same people as are involved in the new Centre, and has attracted strong cohorts of students. However, in 1994 Chinese moved out of the core Oriental Studies building, the Oriental Institute, due to the growth of Oriental Studies subjects and space constraints, followed more recently by Japanese. While this growth is a welcome sign of the vitality of the subject, it has also meant that scholars who once interacted regularly are physically separated. In this context, the new Research Centre for East Asian Cultures has provided a focus for the integrated study of pre-modern East Asia, and promises to attract funding to revitalize and expand Oxford’s traditional strengths in this area, and link to related research around the world.

The Centre’s activities

The forerunner of the Centre, the Society for the Study of Pre-Modern East Asia, was established in 2012, and became the Research Centre for East Asian Cultures in January 2015. In March 2017 it was recognised by the Governing Body of St Anne's College as a Research Centre affiliated with the college. Eleven annual seminars have been held since 2013. Starting in 2022, these have been expanded into Symposia, supported by the Alpine Foundation, Hong Kong. These events feature presentations by senior academics, early career scholars, and advanced doctoral students in the University and from other countries, including Japan, Ireland, and Denmark. These have been hosted in St Anne’s College, under the auspices of the Centre. A more frequent series of events is being planned, including seminars for junior scholars and DPhil students. A larger international conference was held in August 2021, with participants from 13 countries. Another important area of activity is joint research agreements with institutions in East Asia. Formal agreements have been concluded with the Chinese Research Institute at Peking University and the Tōyō Bunko in Japan, and similar links are under negotiation with other top universities and research institutes in China, Japan, and Korea.