> In particular it's a bit difficult to evaluate how much of 通語 was aspirational vs reality. This is definitely a complicated debate with regards to all aspect

> In particular it's a bit difficult to evaluate how much of 通語 was aspirational vs reality. This is definitely a complicated debate with regards to all aspects of the Han, ideas about language included. There was certainly a strong tendency - particularly in the late Western Han - to take a huge variety of cultural inputs and try to synthesize them into something "canonical." (Another way of putting this is - to what extent is most of what we know about early China a reflection of what the Western Han elite believed/understood about early China?) As Yang Xiong worked at the Imperial Library with Liu Xiang and Liu Xin, he would have been part of this process. The other thing to remember about Yang Xiong and the Fangyan is that he was a real polymath - we don't necessarily have to boil his writings down to this or that political end. In particular, he claims to have strongly favored something called the "glosses and exegesis" (xungu 訓詁) approach to studying the classics, which is a bit murky but seems related to trying to understand the original meanings of words. I think there's a strong possibility that this was tied up with his philological interests, rather than some notion of a lingua franca. (I did my graduate research on Yang Xiong, FWIW.) More broadly, the problem with making any strong conclusions about early medieval China is that most of our sources are by elites, for elites, and aren't really concerned with questions like "how did ordinary folks interact with each other?" We don't even get to the level of interest found in, say, Tang chuanqi. > Even allowing for the fact that Ricci is almost certainly experiencing some sort of selection bias (probably mainly talking to people with a certain amount of educational background), it's a pretty clear statement of a single language used across all of Ming China that superseded regional languages. I'm not a political scientist and I don't know nearly as much about the last thousand years of Chinese literary history, so perhaps I'm about to step into a minefield, but I'm not 100% convinced that the average Ming peasant really conceptualized themself as a member of a "national" polity with certain customs (like an "official" language). Which is quite different from China today. I guess another way of putting this is whether a "national" language is top-down or bottom-up. > The whole post-Han pre-Tang time period is a bit of a crazy minefield to get through from a language perspective Trust me, I know :)