The China That Could Have Been: Rhetorical Learning and Political Thought of the Early Modern World

Description

What could a person speak, do, and aspire to be within a complex political society? By the beginning of the seventeenth century, millions of individuals in China and other parts of the Sinitic world were ruminating over this question as a part of the rhetorical training they received. This talk is devoted to the educational experiences and intellectual activities of those individuals living in modern-day China, Korea, and Vietnam, with a particular focus on the transformative period from the late eleventh to the early seventeenth centuries. It excavates their efforts in search of lost, alternative, and better ways of speaking, acting, and existing within a political society they deemed as “China.” Overall, employing a wide array of documents and manuscripts in Sinitic, Mongolian, Persian, and various European languages, this talk explores how the history of political thought could have been written and how it might be rewritten.