In addition to the unusual nature of the classical Chinese language, corrupted texts, and the variety of people who have worked with them, a fourth reason for the complexity of the topic of this entry is also the reason significantly responsible for its being the only one of its kind in this Encyclopedia. There are no entries under “Translating and Interpreting…” for Greek philosophy, for example, nor German Idealism or French Postmodernism. Even Indian philosophy lacks such an entry. This fact should bring home not just the singularity of the classical Chinese written language, compared to contemporary languages derived from the proto-Sanskrit Indo-European family of languages written in alphabet scripts, but remind us as well of the greater distance between Chinese and other cultures from past to present. This is in good measure due to geography: India and Greece have been in contact since before the Alexandrian conquests, but the Himalayas, Xinjiang and Gobi deserts, and the East China Sea made for a fairly solitary cultural development in China that for many centuries hindered cross-cultural intercourse except for the cultures on its periphery, Korea, Japan, and areas of Southeast Asia. The Silk Roads notwithstanding, we find few cross-cultural western links with the Chinese as we do for the Indian (as, e.g., the Hindu god of fire Agni with Latin ignis, root of English “ignite”). It is not necessarily that China is the ultimate “Other” for Europeans and for writers in European traditions, but rather that its heritage is much like European traditions in many of its formal dimensions, yet so different in details, and that writers in European traditions have only come upon the scope and depth of that heritage comparatively recently. It is not for nothing that Leibniz referred to China as the “Oriental Europe” (Leibniz WoC: 12 [1708]).