[Boronx]

Any "true" Orient is completely irretrievable.

Three points.

We're blessed by a great deal of literature from precolonial times in the Orient.

In mathematics, it's possible, once a distortion is understood, to deconvolve a signal to wholly or partially remove it.

Is it really true that in a country as large and insular as China, that everything is distorted by Orientalism?

Not that it matters, but I'd take the East to be any place East of the Roman empire, so pretty much all of Asia East of the Euphrates.