A Short History of China

court and he decreed that Christianity would be tolerated as long

This isolation was a significant factor in Chinese history and in the Chinese view of the world right up to the nineteenth century. For millennia, the Chinese thought of their land, bounded as it was by vast oceans, high mountains and infertile deserts, as ‘All-Under-Heaven’ (tianxia), the entirety of earth and the very centre of civilisation.