Edward Saïd's Orientalism (1978) --which focuses on European framing of the discourse (including definitions of the image and characteristics) of 'the Middle East', to enable the region to be dominated and managed-- was very influential through the decade of the 80s, but its applicability to East Asia has been debated at length. Nick Clifford's posting to H-ASIA, with answers, gives a flavor of the issues. See the Review Symposium on the book in Journal of Asian Studies (1980) for more detail.
A New York Review of Books archive search for 'orientalism' led me to a review of Jonathan Spence's The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds by Richard Jenkyns. And that put me in mind of a text that epitomises transcultural cross-threading: a letter from the Ch'ien Lung Emperor to George III (1793)
This and some others are available as texts from Fordham's Modern History Sourcebook: