In the early modern period, the intensifying movements of materials, plants, and personnel generated a surge in cross-cultural knowledge making. Rather than viewing these exchanges as seamless transmissions of information, this panel investigates the productive tensions between material realities and their myriad textual representations. We interrogate how geography, botany, and craftsmanship were conceptualized through the lenses of creative imagination, philological traditions, and political visions, which created gaps between textual authority and empirical reality.
Starting from Northeast Asia, Sixiang Wang explores the eighteenth-century Korean shipwreck narrative Records of Drifting Across the Sea (1771), arguing that the “drifting records” function less as documentary accounts than political allegories to envision a specific interstate order. Shifting to botanical exchange, Yijun Wang traces the transmission of citrus varieties and nomenclature across China, Korea, and Japan, revealing how classical textual frameworks and philological traditions often obscure or distorted actual biological specimens in transcultural contexts. Finally, moving from East Asia to Central Asia, Yulian Wu investigates the Qing court’s perception of Hindustan jade and its mythical “water-grinding” technique, illustrating how imaginative interpretations of foreign craft technology served the epistemic purpose of empire-building. Together, this panel moves away from treating historical texts as transparent records of information. Instead, we center our discussion on the opacity and fluidity of transcultural exchanges, treating "misinformation" and "imagination" not as merely errors to be corrected, but as productive sites of inquiry for understanding the politics of knowledge making in early modern Asia.