Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China

Acknowledgments

ac k now l e d g m e n t s This book has been in the making for more than a decade, but the debts I have accumulated while reading and writing about personal letters from early medieval China go back even further. My awareness of the genre and its literary and intellectual riches was raised during my studies in Munich (1989–98), where letters first turned up in Wolfgang Bauer’s seminars on Chinese autobiographical literature. This teacher remains an enduring inspiration for me, well beyond Chinese Studies and well beyond his untimely death. It was several years later, after I had moved on to Kiel (1998–2006), that I started to focus my own research on Chinese epistolary literature and culture. Since then, I have benefited from countless conversations and correspondences with friends, colleagues, and students during my time in Kiel and Freiburg in Germany, and, after I came to the United States in 2007, in Boulder, Colorado. Among those who provided assistance, inspiration , criticism, and perspective, I would like to mention, in loose chronological order, Thomas Jansen, Franz Xaver Peintinger, Sabine Dabringhaus, Roland Winkler, Christian Soffel, Anja and Christoph Zuncke, Jeffrey Grossman, Gudula Linck, Christoph Harbsmeier, Robert Gassmann, Paul W. Kroll, Terry Kleeman, David R. Knechtges , Martin Kern, R. Joe Cutter, Ronald C. Egan, Robert E. Harrist , Annette Kieser, Nathan Sivin, Ute Engelhardt, Michael Nylan, Y. Edmund Lien, Enno Giele, Lai Guolong, Zhang Junmin, Chen Sougchang, and Joe P. McDermott. I am also truly appreciative of all the valuable comments from colleagues on the many occasions that I presented portions of this book at various conferences since 2002. I regret that I cannot name all of them. I owe special thanks to the two readers for the University of Washington Press, Tian Xiaofei and Cynthia Chennault, as well as to Matthew Wells, Kay Duffy, and Charles Acknowledgments x Chace, who read the manuscript in various earlier versions and generously shared their perceptive comments and suggestions with me. Without them, this would be an even more flawed book. Of course, I am responsible for all the imperfections that remain. I am grateful to the University of Colorado at Boulder for two semesters of leave in 2009 and 2010, which were a great help in bringing this project to completion. I would also like to acknowledge financial support for the preparation of the manuscript from the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My thanks moreover go to the editors of the Journal of the American Oriental Society in which an earlier version of the third part of this book’s chapter 2 was published in 2007. I also want to express my sincere gratitude to the team at the University of Washington Press and the Modern Language Initiative, who guided me gently and most effectively through the process of turning the manuscript into a book, in particular, Lorri Hagman, Tim Zimmermann , Laura Iwasaki, and Tim Roberts. Finally, I thank Matthias, whose letters and messages I enjoy more than anybody else’s—although not as much as his company. Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China ...