Early Globalism and Chinese Literature, a concise, multi-author “Element,” is part of the Cambridge Elements series. According to its publisher’s website, Elements hold a middle ground between longer academic monographs on the one hand and articles bundled within scholarly journals on the other. They are designed with digital media in mind, so they are not constrained by traditional requirements of length or theme. They are readily accessible online, but also available in print. This particular Element is part of the Elements in the Global Middle Ages series, which, according to the publisher, introduces “an uncentered, interconnected world, c. 500–1500 CE.” (https://multimediafluids.uam.elogim.com/core/publications/elements/global-middle-ages) It should also be noted that the PDF version contains full-color images, as well as helpful hyperlinks to its own sections, figures, footnotes, and bibliography entries. It is available open-access and published through a Creative Commons license.

Early Globalism and Chinese Literature is divided into two parts, “Buddhism and Literature” and “Sea and Story,” bookended by a Prologue and an Epilogue. The authors, Yuanfei Wang and Victor H. Mair, define the scope of their study in the Prologue. Drawing on the definition of Elements in the Global Middle Ages series editor Geraldine Heng, they define “early globalism” as “smaller-scale transregional activities” that prefigure the “globalization” of the modern world, while still unevenly distributed (p. 1). Since the period covered in the volume is too broad to fit neatly into the “Middle Ages” of the series, Wang and Mair make a slight intervention here; they assert that the Chinese “Middle Ages” spans “from the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–9 CE) to the Southern Song (1127–1279),” and they justify their inclusion of examples from “early modern” Ming literature by noting that the dynasty overlapped with the European Middle Ages (p. 4). They also broaden the scope of the term “literature” beyond the Confucian canon and the culturally privileged poetic tradition to include vernacular texts and Buddhist writings. “Literary diffusion,” the authors then state, “refers to the process by which language and literature are transmitted beyond the culture in which they originated, or the process by which language and literature are created and circulated to accommodate the incoming Other” (p. 5).

Part I is entitled “Buddhism and Literature.” Befitting the study’s focus on fragmentary “diffusion” in the premodern and early modern periods, it begins with the Chinese language itself. The authors claim that the Chinese encounter with Buddhism in the medieval period led to foundational changes in language and written expression. Buddhist translators from Central Asia, they note, collaborated with teams of native Chinese speakers to interpret sutras and render them into fluid Chinese prose. As this process developed, it gave rise to an entire arena of discourse about the art of translation: technical jargon and transliteration were to be avoided, and expedient allegories were to be prized. The authors point to the famed “burning house” parable from Kumarajiva’s translation of the Lotus Sutra as an example of the fluent storytelling brought about by the translation process and its development. They also point to words, phrases, and grammatical concepts from translation that carried over into the Chinese language.

From translation and language, this study moves on to the role of Buddhist cultural practices in influencing literature through diffusion, pointing to the Tang and Five Dynasties “bianwen” or “transformation texts” discovered at Dunhuang. These were vernacular stories coupled with images that are believed to have been read aloud to audiences by performers. Wang and Mair credit these texts with carrying literary elements from India into Southeast Asia and China and influencing the development of vernacular literary and performance traditions, despite the fact that the details of this diffusion are now obscured—they note that were it not for the “chance preservation and miraculous discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts,” the “true history of the development of Chinese literature might have remained unknown forever” (p. 24).

This suggestion of undiscovered possibilities sets the stage for more specific examples surrounding “journey to the West” stories. This body of texts includes not only the beloved sixteenth-century novel of that name but also other, related stories and antecedents in forms such as dramas and illustrated shihua stories. The authors concisely summarize the theory that the famed Monkey King character is rooted in the god Hanuman as depicted in the Ramayana, a classic that they cast as a “global story” that diffused throughout an early global network. They also suggest that imported Buddhist concepts such as karmic retribution and magic informed the structure of Journey to the West and other traditional novels.

Part II of the study, entitled “Sea and Story,” turns to the types of literary diffusion that Wang and Mair state were made possible by seafaring ships in the premodern era. These are, fascinatingly, the “Cinderella” story and two fictionalized accounts of the voyages of Zheng He. Stories with strong similarities to the familiar Cinderella are found throughout the world, and many scholars have theorized about its origins; Wang and Mair suggest that it originated in Western Eurasia, developed further in Southeast Asia, found its way to the Zhuang people of Guangxi, and then spread to central China, where it ended up in a Tang collection of tales. The versions of the story share common elements, including not only the familiar lost slipper and the cruel stepmother but also a wish-granting fish; the authors suggest that the simplicity of these elements afforded a variety of localizations. They also propose that, since it spread primarily along the coasts of Eurasia, it probably spread via ship rather than by land, as the previous examples in the study had. Wang and Mair offer Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, Thai, Vietnamese, Zhuang, and Tang Chinese variations on the story, and draw on an impressive range of cultural and linguistic evidence to show their interconnectedness.

Wang and Mair then turn to two sixteenth-century depictions of the voyages of Zheng He, the court play Sanbao’s Heaven-Ordained Voyages on the Western Ocean and the vernacular novel Eunuch Sanbao’s Voyages on the Indian Ocean (following the authors’ translations). Unlike the previous examples, the stories of Zheng He exemplify what the authors call “indirect literary diffusion”: that is to say, they incorporate knowledge of the world beyond the borders of the Ming Empire, gained second-hand from the accounts of others, into a totalizing depiction of the world. The authors identify the techniques by which the two works construct this depiction from fragments of previously published travelogues and histories. They then discuss how the vision situates its viewers or readers vis-a-vis the “exotic” world and its values. The “Sinocentric” world depicted allowed the audience and readers to contemplate the place of the Ming Empire they inhabited within the broader global system. The authors hypothesize that the tales led not only to a sense of dominance but also to self-reflection.

The very brief Epilogue concludes the volume by emphasizing the long history of “globalism” and the intertwining of premodern literary traditions.

As mentioned above, the scope of Early Globalism and Chinese Literature is not strictly limited to that of its title or of its series. This is particularly true of Part II, which covers material from eras commonly considered “early modern”—a designation that would account for the turn from the more fragmentary and dispersed diffusion of the earlier part of the study to the consolidation of global elements into single works. Scholars of early modern literature such as Rivi Handler-Spitz, Ning Ma, and William Hedberg have demonstrated the flow of literary texts, tropes, and ideas among contemporary Ming China, Edo Japan, and Europe. Yet the broad scope of this study adds a diachronic element to such synchronic work, extending it backwards to the late Han period. The authors also emphasize the long history of Buddhist influence on Chinese literary culture, and place all of this into a single, easily accessible volume. It is written in a well-organized and accessible manner that, though it perhaps misses the opportunity to draw out theoretical frameworks and conclusions about “early globalism” more fully, makes it highly suitable for the undergraduate classroom. Its synthesis of much of the existing scholarship, including work by Wang and Mair themselves, also makes the volume an ideal starting point for scholars conducting research in related fields.