Books in the Encounters with Asia series

The Blacks of Premodern China describes the earliest Chinese encounters with peoples regarded as black. It focuses on the first exposure of Chinese to blacks hailing from East Africa, chiefly from today's Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, who arrived in China as slaves between the seventh and seventeenth centuries C.E.

In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Marten Soederblom Saarela shows how-through observation, inference, and reference to ideas on language and writing-intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Choson Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and the uses to which it was put: recording sounds and arranging words.