Confucian Academies in East Asia is a first comprehensive look at the history and legacy of these unique institutions in China, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, and both Koreas.

The fifteen studies presented inConfucian Academies in East Asia offer insight into the history and legacy of these unique institutions of knowledge and education. The contributions analyze origins, spread and development of Confucian academies across China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan from multiple perspectives. This edited volume is one of the first attempts to understand Confucian academies as a complex transnational, intellectual, and cultural phenomena that played an essential role in various areas of East Asian education, philosophy, religious practice, local economy, print industry, and even archery. The broad chronological range of essays allows it to demonstrate the role of Confucian academies as highly adaptable and active agents of cultural and intellectual change since the eighth century until today. An indispensable handbook for studies of Confucian culture and institutions since the eighth century until the present. Contributors are: Chien Iching, Chung Soon-woo, Deng Hongbo, Martin Gehlmann, Vladimír Glomb, Lan Jun, Lee Byoung-Hoon, Eun-Jeung Lee, Thomas H.C. Lee, Margaret Dorothea Mehl, Steven B. Miles, Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Nguyễn Tuấn-Cường, Linda Walton and Minamizawa Yoshihiko.

Richey has written an engaging and well-crafted book that clearly delineates the oftentimes fitful development of Confucianism in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. At the same time, he masterfully demonstrates how Confucianism slowly came to dominate politics, thought, and society in each of these places and still continues to inform their assumptions, values, and institutions. Richey also expertly underscores the outsized role that government has played in promoting and sustaining this tradition's formidable influence.

Presents the philosophy and values of Hirose Tanso, a scholar, educator, and poet whose well-articulated educational program was partly responsible for the relative ease with which Japan emerged from hundreds of years of self-imposed isolation and became a powerful modern nation.

Seventeen scholars from varying fields here consider the implications of Confucian concerns--self-cultivation, regulation of the family, social civility, moral education, well-being of the people, governance of the state, and universal peace--in industrial East Asia.

What is Confucianism? This book provides a wide-ranging view of the tradition and its contemporary relevance for Western readers. Discussing the development of Confucianism in China, the work goes on to show the deep impact of Korean and Japanese cultures on Confucian thinking. A dialogic way of thought, highly sensitive to locations and conditions, Confucianism is shown to be a valuable philosophical resource for a multicultural, globalizing world. In addition to discussing Confucianism' unique responses to traditional philosophical problems, such as the nature of self and society, Confucianism in Context shows how Confucian philosophy can contribute to contemporary issues such as democracy, human rights, feminism, and ecology.

In the early days of the modernization of East Asia, Neo-Confucianism was often held responsible for the purported intellectual, political, and social failings of traditional societies in the nineteenth century. Today, with frequent comparisons between the rapid success at modernization of many of these societies and the slowness of other underdeveloped countries, Neo-Confucianism has come to be seen under a very different light; analysts now point to the common Confucian culture of China, Japan, Korea, and overseas Chinese communities as a driving force in the East Asian peoples' receptivity to new learning, disciplined industriousness, and capacity for both cultural and economic development. Central to this remarkable capacity for development, these essays argue, lies the influence of the great twelfth-century thinker Chu Hsi. He has been considered responsible for providing much of the intellectual mortar that preserved the established order for centuries. However, when viewed in their historical setting, many of Chu's views can be seen as liberal--indeed, progressive. This is the first comprehensive study of Chu as an educator and of the propagation of his teachings throughout East Asia. Covering a wide spectrum of intellectual and social developments, the contributors address the ways in which Neo-Confucian thought and ethics were adapted to changes in Chinese society that anticipate many features and problems of modern society today.