floods, and earthquakes, or by increasing human misery and social
chaos.
The Emperor ruled ‘all under Heaven’ (tian-xia), the entire
human world as cosmically constituted. In a cosmic sense, the Son of
Heaven was a universal ruler; not just his capital, but he himself was
the centre of the world. The realm over which he ruled was the Middle
Kingdom, a term that acknowledged that other kingdoms lay beyond
it in the four directions. The Chinese worldview was sinocentric, but
this did not mean that it ignored the existence of other peoples.
Beyond the core area of Chinese civilisation lived barbarian peoples
(yi-ti), inferior in every way to the Chinese, yet still existing under
Heaven and so part of the great ‘family’ presided over by the Son of
Heaven. Though Chinese superiority was primarily cultural, this easily
slipped into attitudes that were essentially racial. Non-Chinese were
likened to animals and stood well below Chinese in the socio-cultural
hierarchy. Redemption was possible only for those who were culturally
assimilated. Until this happened, non-Chinese were to be treated with
paternal benevolence, as objects of the emperor’s protection.
The place of non-Chinese in this view of the world was arrived
at over the course of time. The Chinese had always been surrounded
by those they termed ‘barbarians’, for their lack of civilisation (wen).
In unifying the empire, Qin pushed back the barbarians in the north
and northwest, and protected the Chinese core cultural area by con-
struction of the Great Wall. It was in the southeast, however, that the
greatest gains were made. There new military/administrative comman-
deries were created, colonised by a motley collection of criminals,
fugitives from military service or forced labour, bonded servants, and
small traders and retailers who stood at the bottom of the social scale.
Continuing internal migration during the Han dynasty eventually
brought all the non-Chinese coastal peoples, known collectively as the
Yue, inhabiting the region from Fujian to Guangdong and south to the
Red River delta (in what is now northern Vietnam) under Chinese
political control and cultural influence.
A Short History of China and Southeast Asia