The workshop “Reconstructing Modern East Asian Cultural History. A Dialogical Approach” is aimed at stimulating a new interdisciplinary and international cooperation on the question of modernity in East Asia through a cross-cultural lens. We highlight the construction of multiple knowledges (in fields such as administration, art, visual cultures, literature, medicine, music, political thought, urbanity), addressing the ways in which life in a “hybrid cultural community” is mutually shaped in the context of modernity, empire and globalization, and this beyond a one-sided approach to what “savants” do to “others”. The focus on intercultural dynamics brings a particular attention to the development of networks enabling actors to mobilize and share diverse resources, as well as to processes of rationalization and internalization in the framework of “laboratories of modernity”.