Hilde De Weerdt’s new monograph The Arts of Governance: Sinitic Political Advice Literature from Medieval Times to the Present is an ambitious project. Focusing on “the past and present global history and currency of medieval Sinitic mirror literature” (p. viii), the book traces the longue durée evolution of the genre from the Tang period (618–907) to the present, while also examining its reception and circulation in East and Inner Asia, as well as in early modern Europe. It is a book that embodies, in every sense of the phrase, the author’s conception of “fluid boundaries.” Using Tang Emperor Taizong’s 太宗 (r. 626–649) mirror literature as a through line, De Weerdt transcends the conventional temporal divide between the medieval and the modern periods, and at the same time places Sinitic mirror texts in dialogue with broader traditions of political advice literature across Eurasia, thus advocating a comparative approach and inviting reflection on the dialectic between the local and the global history.

The first four chapters are best read as two pairs. Working within the framework of Sinitic history, Chapters 1 and 2 together illustrate a paradigm shift in political advice for rulers, moving, as their titles suggest, from “the arts of governance” (zhengshu 政術) to “the learning of emperors” (dixue 帝學). The Taizong mirror literature that emerged at the Tang court in the seventh and eighth centuries followed a precedent-based and pragmatic logic of statecraft, whereas the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the Song dynasty (960–1279), beginning in the eleventh century, ushered in an imperial pedagogy grounded in the learning of the Way and the universal principles governing human nature and the cosmos. Simply put, imperial education underwent a Tang-Song transition, or Neo-Confucian turn, from practical administrative technology of rulership to the philosophical and moral cultivation of the emperor personally. The core mirror texts thus changed from Tang works such as Model for an Emperor (Di fan 帝範, ca. 648) and The Essentials of Governance of the Reign of Constancy Revealed (Zhenguan zhengyao 貞觀政要, ca. 729), to the works compiled by Song Neo-Confucian officials, including The Learning of Emperors (Dixue 帝學, 1086), The Continuous Mirror for Aid in Governance (Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑, 1084), and The Extended Meaning of the Great Learning (Daxue yanyi 大學衍義, 1229). Accordingly, the rhetoric of mirror literature transformed from body to mind. The metaphors of body and mirror were fundamental building blocks in the Tang mirror literature, foregrounding the ruler’s capacity for self-reflection and moderation, open-minded engagement with his ministers, and benevolent concern for the people. Tang authors envisioned this body politic as a hierarchically structured organism sustained by reciprocal ruler–official relationships and the “arts of governance.” This Tang model was subsequently superseded by the Neo-Confucian ideal that throughout his life, the emperor should study the “learning of the Way,” whose fountainhead lies in antiquity. Neo-Confucians’ defining metaphor of the root and the branches underscored the primacy of self-cultivation as the foundation of political order. In its most radical formulation, Neo-Confucian ideology conceived of the emperor as the embodiment of the Way, while Neo-Confucian scholar-officials had the duty to guide him toward realizing that ideal through learning. The change also meant that the conventional ruler–minister political hierarchy was supplemented by a pedagogical vision in which Neo-Confucians aspired to be teachers or mentors of the ruler.

Chapters 3 and 4 deal with a second wave of innovative reception of the Taizong mirror literature, but in a context beyond the East Asian sphere. The stage was set in early modern Europe, as “Sinophilism” gained currency through the efforts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuits, who introduced European readers to their firsthand experiences in East Asia, as well as to Latin translations of Sinitic classics. The eighteenth century witnessed a broader circulation of Sinitic knowledge, including, in particular, vernacular translations of the Taizong mirror literature promoted by Enlightenment writers. The two chapters examine, respectively, German and French adaptations of Taizong’s political advice, both sharing a reformist agenda: to constrain absolute monarchical power while strengthening European monarchical states based on Chinese models. Readers will surely be impressed by the vast range of genres and media involved. Chapter 3 focuses on two texts about cameralist statecraft in eighteenth-century Germany. Johann Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi’s (ca. 1717–1771) Comparisons of European with Asian and Other Supposedly Barbarian Governments (Vergleichungen der Europäischen mit den Asiatischen und andern vermeintlich Barbarischen Regierungen, 1762) is a political theoretical treatise that attributes the success of Chinese monarchy to three pillars: the emperor’s honor as father of the people, officials charged with remonstrance and historiography, and the priority of education over law, with Emperor Taizong serving as the ideal exemplar. The second major text, Christoph Martin Wieland’s (1733–1813) The Golden Mirror (Der goldne Spiegel, 1772, 2nd edition 1794), is a pedagogical novel that offers a cosmopolitan model of princely mirrors, highlighting the institutionalization of education for princes and the “Tifanese Constitution”—a social ethos or commonwealth—as an effective constraint on absolute power. Notably, De Weerdt has conducted a fascinating investigation into the multilayered (pseudo-)translations and transmissions of Model for an Emperor that left traces like the central character Tifan in Wieland’s fictional-historical utopia (pp. 101–103).

Chapter 4 then turns to French adaptations from around the same period. Unlike their German counterparts, who interpreted Taizong’s mirrors through the lens of their political theory, French writers mobilized these texts, through translation, for practical administrative purposes. As a result, we encounter a more dispersed image of Taizong and his advisers, with individual cases and excerpts from the mirror literature deployed in apology for the Jesuits at the French court or in arguments for the abolition of capital punishment. Above all, the French court transmitted and circulated “remarkable actions” (faits mémorables), or anecdotes and events, from the Taizong mirror literature not only in words but also in pictorial media. In the final phase, as the zeitgeist shifted in nineteenth-century Europe and intellectuals reassessed the “unmodern” Chinese monarchy with a more critical eye, the legacy of earlier “Sinophilic” discourse nonetheless persisted. As De Weerdt demonstrates, books of etiquette and moral instruction compiled for the education of French patriotic youth enjoyed wide circulation. Rather than serving as manuals of rulership and statecraft, Taizong’s lore now entered middle-class family evening readings, where they offered lessons in virtue and models for becoming qualified and decent citizens.

That the Taizong mirror literature found a place in nineteenth-century French etiquette books as a vehicle for shaping modern citizenship in the aftermath of the ancien régime provides a natural transition to the final chapter, which examines how traditional mirror texts were modernized in East Asia. Continuing the comparative approach, Chapter 5 demonstrates how The Essentials of Governance acquired subtly different meanings in diverse geopolitical contexts. The Japanese translation transformed “the learning of emperors” into a literature of management and leadership; party and governmental reformers enlisted its vernacular version in Taiwan as a way to advocate “rule by law”; in Malaysia, a Chinese migrant and monk published Taizong’s mirrors with a discernible nationalist inflection; throughout the history of the PRC, The Essentials of Governance evolved, through processes of reinterpretation and vernacularization, from a patriotic invocation of a heroic military leader into a contemporary Chinese classic, while also undergoing successive re-readings, from a Marxist framework of class struggle to the official promotion of “traditional culture.” Taken together, these cases show how the Taizong mirror literature acquired new cultural and political lives in the modern world, where it both legitimized authoritarian power structures and articulated alternatives to western models of sociopolitical order. Finally, De Weerdt illustrates not only the divergent uses of Taizong’s mirrors across different East Asian regions, but also these countries’ common goal of national revival.

The limited scope of a review cannot do full justice to the many merits of this book, but I would like to raise a few thoughts for discussion. My first point concerns the body metaphor. Although I agree that mirror literature as a distinct literary genre emerged only in early medieval China, several of its central concepts can be traced back to the classical tradition. One is the body metaphor: in the Book of Documents, which attained a relatively stable textual form no later than the Han period and became a perennial staple of the imperial curriculum thereafter, the body politic of sage-kings and worthy ministers is framed through the analogy of the ruler as the “head” (yuanshou 元首) and his ministers as the “legs, arms, ears, and eyes” (gugong ermu 股肱耳目; “Yi Ji” 益稷 chapter). In other words, the polity was imagined as a body long before that metaphor found expression in the literary form of princely mirrors.

Another issue concerns a parallel history of imperial pedagogy in Middle Period China: while Song Neo-Confucians largely dismissed The Essentials of Governance, the contemporaneous Khitan Liao (907–1125) and Jurchen Jin (1115–1234) courts continued to hold the Taizong mirror literature in high esteem. Yet despite passing references to the broader circulation of The Essentials at middle-period Inner Asian courts (pp. 39, 177), this book largely omits the Liao and Jin developments of the mirror tradition. Admittedly, we know next to nothing about imperial education of Khitan and Jurchen rulers, except for scattered records in official histories. But textual evidence shows that Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) court lectures and mirror literature inherited at least as much from the Jurchen Jin conventions as from the conquered Southern Song (1127–1279).Footnote ¹ This continuity also helps explain “the early fourteenth-century Mongol infatuation with the Taizong mirror literature” (p. 2). The Liao-Jin-Yuan continuum, in which Emperor Taizong and The Essentials remained enduring paradigms of imperial rulership, is perhaps the missing piece of the puzzle in De Weerdt’s otherwise compelling account of the transformation of imperial pedagogy from the Tang through the Song and beyond.

Finally, a word on vernacularization. I first distinguish two related forms: vernacularization in tandem with translation into other languages in the cross-regional circulation of texts, and vernacularization as a shift in linguistic register within Sinitic culture itself. The various translations of The Essentials at Asian courts in the Middle Period, as well as its later European adaptations, belong to the former category. My concern lies with the latter category. The dynamic connections between literary Sinitic or classical Chinese and vernacular or colloquial Chinese became increasingly prominent from the Song-Yuan period onward. By focusing on Ge Zhi’s 戈直 Collected Discussions on The Essentials of Governance from the Reign of Constancy Revealed (Zhenguan zhengyao jilun 貞觀政要集論, 1333) as an illustration of the vernacularization of Sinitic mirror literature, De Weerdt argues that the proselytizing mission of Neo-Confucian teachers activated the adoption of an unadorned plain language, making their doctrines at once universal, more authentic, and potentially accessible to all human beings. While I find this explanation convincing, I would emphasize another, perhaps more decisive, historical force behind the vernacularization process. After centuries of accumulating social and cultural forces conducive to vernacularization on Chinese soil, it was the Mongol conquest, I argue, that eventually blew the lid off a long-simmering pressure cooker. One suggestive piece of evidence is that all extant notes and lecture outlines from Southern Song court lectures remain composed in literary Sinitic, however plain or straightforward their style may be. Indeed, I do not think either Ge Zhi’s Collected Discussions or Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (1130–1200) “Classics Mat Lecture Notes” (“Jingyan jiangyi” 經筵講義) can be properly characterized as vernacular writings in the strict sense, let alone as texts composed in colloquial Chinese. Their written language remained fundamentally literary Sinitic with stylistic simplification. A more pronounced shift can be observed in the writings of Yuan-dynasty Neo-Confucian scholar-officials Xu Heng 許衡 (1209–1281) and Wu Cheng 吳澄 (1249–1333). Taking Xu’s “Straightforward Explications of the Summa and Outline of the Great Learning” (“Zhishuo Daxue yaolüe” 直說大學要略) and Wu’s court lecture notes on the chapter of “Monarchical Virtue” (“Junde” 君德) in Model for an Emperor as examples, their written language was unmistakably vernacular—near-verbatim records of oral lectures delivered in colloquial Chinese—and their intended audience was unmistakably Mongol rulers and aristocrats who generally lacked the literary Sinitic literacy.

To be sure, I do not mean to overstate the role of the Mongols or to reduce the complex socio-historical factors behind the rise of vernacular culture to a single cause. The multilingual environment fostered by the Mongol rulers, together with urbanization, commercialization, popular entertainment, printing boom, and examination culture, collectively created fertile conditions for the flourishing of vernacular textual production. Moreover, as De Weerdt has shown elsewhere, vernacularization proceeded through both top-down and bottom-up channels, with the imperial court and local schools reinforcing one another in a dynamic process of linguistic change.Footnote ² Even so, I would argue that the most far-reaching development was the profound collapse and subsequent reconfiguration of the Sinitic civil order under Mongol rule. Yuan China must have been a topsy-turvy world in the eyes of Han literati: mastery of elegant literary Sinitic, long regarded as the highest form of cultural capital, no longer guaranteed political or social advancement, while the Mongol court patronized colloquial Chinese and a variety of non-Sinitic languages. In so doing, it lent authority to and conferred new prestige upon colloquial linguistic registers that had previously occupied a subordinate cultural position, thereby accelerating the vernacularization of Sinitic literary culture in written form. In short, alongside the pedagogical imperatives that De Weerdt identifies within Neo-Confucian practice, we should also take into account the broader sociolinguistic ecology of Mongol Yuan China, in which the impulse toward vernacularization gained unprecedented momentum.

De Weerdt’s The Arts of Governance unfolds a fascinating case of how medieval Sinitic political advice literature traveled across time and space. Her study of Sinitic traditions is remarkably thorough and nuanced, rich in details that bring a knowing smile to specialists, while never losing sight of comparative and cross-disciplinary prospects with early modern European and modern Asian contexts. Questions of translation and vernacularization, as well as the possibility of writing global history while remaining attentive to local contexts (or in John Pocock’s terms, the self-referentiality of “civilizations”), are among the book’s highlights that merit further inquiry. The book thus makes a significant contribution not only to the study of premodern China, but also to global history more broadly, offering thought-provoking insights and innovative methodological approaches that will inspire future research.Footnote ³