ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although this is a book about trying to observe unseen things, the nature of the help and support I have received from many people while writing it is visible in the text. Their support and wisdom transcends thoughtfulness, expertise, and love. So let me thank, for very many reasons, Marta Hanson, Dore Levy, Shang Wei, Bob Hymes, David Wang, and Bob Ramsey.

Thank you to David Rolston, Yi-Li Wu, Chen Hsiu-fen, Nathan Sivin, Charlotte Furth, and Paul Unschuld. Markus Asper, Asaf Goldschmidt, Zhao Lu and Michael Lackner were gracious enough to invite me to productive workshops. Brill and DeGruyter have given kind permission to reprint parts of the publications that resulted from those workshops. Michael Stanley-Baker, Mark Meulenbeld, Nalini Kirk, Yung-Yung Chang, Matthias Schumann, Thies Staack, Joachim Prackwieser, and Carolin Tzschentke have been extremely insightful and helpful commenting on my writing or my thoughts.

I am grateful for my many wonderful colleagues at the University of Maryland, particularly those in the Chinese program: Minglang Zhou, Belinda He, Guling Hu, Mei Kong, Jungjung Lee-Heitz, and Yuli Wang.

Many parts of this book benefitted from the kind feedback from my colleagues and friends at conferences of the Association for Asian Studies, Modern Language Association, and International Conference on East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine. I have presented research related to this book to colleagues at Rice University, Academia Sinica, and Yuelu Academy, and I am grateful to Rich Smith, Evelyn Chiung-yun Liu, and Ying Zhang, respectively, for the opportunity to present my work and learn from the subsequent enriching conversations.

A Research and Scholarship Award from the University of Maryland Graduate School in the spring of 2019 enabled me to begin to assemble this project into a coherent whole, right before the pandemic struck and ruined those plans. I am also grateful for the TOME (Toward an Open-Access Monograph Ecosystem) grant that has enabled this book to be published in print and open access editions simultaneously.

The staff at Starr Library at Columbia (Chengzhi Wang), Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Christian Dunkel), the Wellcome Library, Academia Sinica, UMD Libraries (Kana Jenkins), and the Library of Congress have all been enormously helpful in their willingness to help me track down materials and think through how to use them. I am also grateful to the friendly libraries that make so many of their materials freely available in digital format, particularly those at Harvard University, Keio University, Waseda University, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. I am similarly grateful for the tireless, altruistic efforts of Wei Ceng at Shuge.org, Ulrich Theobald at Chinaknowledge.org, Sean Wang and Shih-pei Chen at Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), Donald Sturgeon and others at Chinese Text Project.org, and everyone who is dedicated to providing unfettered access to online texts and research tools.

Thanks especially to Lorri Hagman. I have learned as much from her about Asian studies and scholarship as I have from anyone, perhaps more than anyone. Thanks also to Caitlin Tyler-Richards and everyone at the University of Washington Press, who have been patient with me through the process of creating this book—a pandemic and a year longer than I thought it would take. I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers of my manuscript. The pains they took and the time they spent commenting on the entire manuscript has made this a much better book; their suggestions were extremely helpful. Any remaining errors, gaffs, or infelicities are mine, despite the efforts of so many.

Thank you to Richard C. Y. Chung, Pat Hui, and Rich Smith for facilitating my study of Chinese culture and other good things in life.

Most of all, I would like also to thank Angus Worthing, Eugene Poon-Kaneko, Robert Smith, my parents, and especially Chava Brandriss, Ella, Maggie, and Molly for their support and expertise. I love you.