Leiden University Student Repository

Emminger, David (2021)

Intruding Influences: The Imperial Chinese Tributary System and Ryukyuan Concepts of Legitimate Rule

Research master thesis | Asian Studies (research) (MA)

This thesis analyses the development of Ryukyuan narratives of political legitimacy under the influence of the imperial Chinese tributary system. For centuries, the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was annexed by Meiji Period Japan in 1879 and is today divided among Japan's Okinawa and Kagoshima Prefectures, formed an important linking bridge between China and Japan, East Asia's two dominant political entities. Based on a close reading and partial translation of relevant passages from several historical documents, most notably the kingdom's two official histories Chūzan Seikan and Chūzan Seifu, the thesis investigates the socio-political shift in succeeding conceptualisations of Ryukyuan kingship, the monarch's political legitimacy, and the country's state doctrine that occurred from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Ryukyu Kingdom

Okinawa

Chinese Tributary System

History

Political Legitimacy

Historiography

Author

Emminger, David

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisors

Els, P. van

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en