Outer Dark

Territorially speaking, China remains an empire. FROM UNIVERSE TO NATION-STATE Until its engagement with Europe in the nineteenth century, China saw itself in terms quite different from those of a nation-state. China believed that it was the centre of the world, the Middle Kingdom, the вЂland under Heaven’ ( tianxia), on an entirely different plane from other kingdoms and countries, not even requiring a name. [738] It was the chosen land not by virtue of God, as in the case of Israel or the United States, but by the sheer brilliance of its civilization. Perhaps the best way to illustrate imperial China’s mentality is by the maps of the period. These consisted of a series of concentric circles or rectangles, with Beijing at the epicentre, the core formed by the northern Chinese, then progressively moving outwards across China, from those fully accepted as Chinese, to the inner barbarians, the outer barbarians, the tributary states, and finally to those condemned to outer darkness, deemed incapable of being civilized, who lived in distant lands and continents (see illustration on p. 242). [739] Imperial China, in short, embraced an utterly Sinocentric view of its place in the global order ...»