Adoption of Chinese literary culture

Chinese writing, culture and institutions were imported as a whole by Vietnam, Korea, Japan and other neighbouring states over an extended period.

[1] Shared familiarity with the Chinese classics and Confucian values provided a common framework for intellectuals and ruling elites across the region.

Classical works of the Warring States period and Han dynasty such as the Mencius, the Commentary of Zuo and Sima Qian's Historical Records were admired as models of prose style through the ages.

In comparison, the literary language was admired for its terseness and economy of expression, but it was difficult to understand if read aloud, even in the local pronunciation.

Like Latin in Europe it allowed scholars from different lands to communicate, and provided a stock of roots from which compound technical terms could be created.

By the 13th century, metal movable type was used by government printers in Korea, but seems not to have been extensively used in China, Vietnam or Japan.

[15] The Red River Delta area was occupied by Chinese empires and states for almost all of the period from 111 BC to 938 AD.

[16] The earliest extant writings by Vietnamese authors are poems from the late 10th century, in Chinese, by the Buddhist monks Lac Thuan and Khuông Việt.

Civil service examinations on the Chinese model began in 1075, and in the following year a college was established for training sons of the ruling elite in the Confucian classics.

[16] The influence of Confucian literati grew in the following Trần dynasty (1225–1400) until they had a monopoly on public office, which they kept, almost uninterrupted, until the examination system was abolished by the French colonial administration in 1913.

His poem was the first of a series of statements of Vietnamese determination to resist northern invaders, all written in Literary Chinese.

[21] In the centuries after independence, Vietnamese authors adapted Chinese characters (Chữ Hán) to produce a script for their own language.

[23] Over the centuries it became the vehicle for a flourishing vernacular literature, but all formal writing continued to be in Literary Chinese, except during two short-lived attempts at reform.

[25] Finally both Literary Chinese and Chữ Nôm were replaced by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in the early 20th century.

[14] Chinese was first introduced to Korea in the first century BC, when the Han dynasty invaded the northern part of the peninsula and established the Four Commanderies.

Many of the gugyeol characters were abbreviated, and some of them are identical in form and value to symbols in the Japanese katakana syllabary, though the historical relationship between the two is not yet clear.

[31] All formal writing, including the official annals of the Korean dynasties and almost all government documents, was done in Chinese until the late 19th century.

[32] Several fiction genres were written in Chinese, including romances, beginning with the 15th century New Stories from Gold Turtle Mountain.

[34] Early attempts to write the Korean language used a number of complex and unwieldy systems collectively known as Idu, using Chinese characters both for their meaning and their sound.

[36] Although the new script was clearly more efficient, it was limited to informal writing and recording of folk tales until, as part of the Gabo Reform in December 1894, the civil examinations were abolished and government documents were required to be printed in Korean.

[48] Around 700, an imperial academy (the Daigaku-ryō) was founded to train the sons of the aristocracy in Chinese and the classics and to administer the first stage of civil service examinations.

[49] By the 13th century knowledge of Literary Chinese had become so limited that the government had to delegate official writing, including correspondence before the unsuccessful Mongol invasions of Japan, to the Buddhist clergy.

[60] From the late 14th century, selected sons of the nobility of Chūzan, and later the unified Ryukyu Kingdom, were sent to the Guozijian in the Ming capital to study the Chinese classics.