Character Books and the Maritime World of Early Modern Asia

In late imperial China, character books (zazi 雜字) were a popular genre of primer for beginners to recognize core characters and vocabulary. Its emphasis on practical use rather than Confucian education distinguishes it from traditional primers like the Sanzi jing (Three-character classic), Baijia xing (Myriad family names), and Qianzi wen (Thousand-character text). The authors of character books selected basic characters/words and grouped them into various sections, such as food, everyday objects, natural phenomena, geography, people, and the like. Beyond characters, the primer offered more practical knowledge for the intended audience, including various letter and invitation formats. This paper incorporates the Chinese in the Philippines into the reading public of late imperial China. Most of them were from Fujian and had easy access to imprints from Jianyang 建陽, a renowned book printing center that flourished between the 11^th and 17^th centuries. To illustrate the interactions between character books and the knowledge world of overseas Chinese, three Chinese documents preserved in European archives and libraries will be analyzed: a Chinese “memorial” to the King of Spain in 1598, the Selden Map from the early 17^th century, and some Chinese manuscripts of their Spanish learning (c. 17^th century). This research combines the history of books and maritime history to demonstrate how the convergence of the two separate fields can shed light on our understanding of the actions of Chinese in the maritime world of early modern Asia.