Introduction: What is East Asia? -- The origins of civilization in East Asia -- The formative era -- The age of cosmopolitanism -- The creation of a community : China, Korea, and Japan (7th-10th centuries) -- Mature independent trajectories (10th-16th centuries) -- Early-modern East Asia (16th-18th centuries) -- The nineteenth-century encounter of civilizations -- The age of Westernization (1900-1929) -- The dark valley (1930-1945) -- Japan since 1945 -- Korea since 1945 -- China since 1945 -- Afterword.