Studying Literary Chinese lays the foundations for our critical engagement with Chinese worlds, both past and present. We gain unmediated access to those worlds and meet their inhabitants on their own terms.聽

Through Literary Chinese, we encounter people of the past with the fullest possible understanding of their own language and modes of expression. But studying Literary Chinese also urges us to assess our own assumptions in two important ways.

First, we face dramatic differences. These demand that we step outside the terms of our own experiences and instead open ourselves to other ways of thinking about the world and acting in it.

Second, we recognise points of continuity. Since many of the legacies of traditional Chinese culture given weight in the present have been transmitted through Literary Chinese, its influence on modern and contemporary Chinese languages, thought, and cultural discourse is pervasive, though the relationship between past and present is often complex. Texts written in Literary Chinese have also been influenced by and, in turn, have decisively shaped languages and cultural expressions elsewhere in Asia.