The progress and significance of this southern expansion for
relations with Southeast Asia will be examined in the next chapter.
Here, what is important is how Qin and Han conquests reinforced
Chinese thinking about how non-Chinese peoples should be incor-
porated into the Chinese world order. The most powerful of these
non-Chinese peoples, the Xiongnu, precursors to the Huns, inhabited
the steppe lands to the northwest. As their mobility and fighting
prowess made Chinese conquest impossible, appeasement was the only
possible recourse. Rich annual payments of silk, alcohol and foodstuffs
and dispatch of Chinese ‘princesses’ were used to buy off Xiongnu
rulers. A treaty signed in 198 BCE not only established the Great Wall
as the frontier between Han China and the Xiongnu confederacy, but
also formally noted the equivalent status of the two ‘brother’ king-
doms. This was for the benefit of the Xiongnu. For the Chinese,
brothers were never of equal status: one was always the elder, the other
the younger. Even so, such a situation rankled for the Chinese, for it
threatened their own understanding of the world, and the respective
places of Chinese and barbarians in it. Moreover, as the treaty stipu-
lated that the Han would provide a substantial annual ‘gift’ of silk and
other commodities in return for a Xiongnu commitment not to raid
Chinese settlements within the wall, it was a moot point who was
paying tribute to whom.^7
Despite the treaty of 198 BCE, therefore, the Chinese never
for a moment accepted the Xiongnu as their equals. The Chinese view
of the world that had evolved by the later Han period (the first two
centuries CE) conceived it in the form of five concentric zones or
regions (wu-fu), whose relations to each other were strictly hierarchi-
cal. At the centre stood the royal domain, the area under the direct
rule of the emperor himself. Beyond lay the zone controlled by the
great feudatory lords of the kingdom, who were loyal to the emperor.
Then came those areas, known as the pacified zone, that were cultur-
ally Chinese, but had had to be conquered in order to be brought into
the empire. These three zones comprised the Middle Kingdom, beyond
The Chinese view of the world