Preface

In this issue of East Asian History, we present a number of ‘firsts’.

In the Preface to the previous issue, Editor Benjamin Penny stated our intention to republish significant and hard-to-find papers by the late Professor Igor de Rachewiltz, whom he described as ‘perhaps the greatest historian of Mongolia and Mongolian-period China of his generation’. In this issue, we are pleased to make available for the first time online two of these papers; we are also particularly delighted to publish for the first time in any medium ‘Sino-Mongolica Remota’. This philological article on inscriptions, manuscripts, and printed texts is, in Igor’s own words, ‘the outcome of much reading and writing on the subject over many decades’.

Duncan Campbell takes us through the historical context and vicissitudes of the Yongle Encyclopaedia — a rare and magnificent volume that has, after languishing in a library backlog for almost 50 years, been rediscovered and made available to researchers for the first time.

Matthew Lauer critically reopens a complex eighteenth-century Chosŏn murder case to challenge accepted notions of the dynamic between Confucian ritual and law.

And Lin Yu-ju interprets for the first time in an English-language forum the significance of a late-1700s Taiwan aboriginal-boundary map and its 14,000-word description, providing insights into Qing territorial policy, frontier society, and ethnic relationships.