This book brings together a range of studies that aim at illustrating the ideas, institutions, historical patterns, and contemporary relevance of the social-political system that existed in the main part of East Asia during the premodern era. This is most often known as the Confucian literati-bureaucratic state, the imperial Chinese bureaucratic state, or the Confucian-Legalist state, that was established and endured most notably in China, but also in several East Asian societies such as Korea, Vietnam, Japan.