Recall a point from the opening chapter: The land we call China was not always Chinese. In fact, in a very real sense for many eons, when the world of Sinitic culture was defined by the Central Plain, no one was Chinese, a term I shall argue that only gains real meaning in the last millennium. Through most of the first millennium BCE, the people of the Central Plain, the Yellow River flood plain where classical Sinitic culture emerged, called their land “the courts (or kingdoms, i.e., guo) in the center,” or Zhongguo. As explained in Chapter 1, this was both a political and cultural term, referencing a large and diverse realm across the Plain that shared several defining attributes, most notably a parallel, if not entirely identical, orthography through which the literate elite shared a common body of classical texts. What it did not mean then, as it has come to mean only in recent times, is China. A range of terms were used instead by the people of the Sinitic world to refer to their homeland; as the Sinitic world gained definition, Zhongguo instead defined the geophysical realm of Sinitic culture, and Sinitic culture defined civilization.

These several “courts in the center” shared an academic culture that fostered a degree of commonality even as they remained politically and linguistically disunited. This was much like the diverse courts and cultures of late medieval Europe, where a common cultural discourse built on Latin, the shared language of the literate elite, and the broadly shared premises of Christianity provided a common identity even as they simultaneously maintained regionalized and localized political and colloquial identity. Like medi-eval Europe, the Central Plain through the first millennium BCE remained a fractious and restricted realm. The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the cultural transformation from Sinitic toward one that was to become China, from a world that was both geographically and culturally constrained to one that was geographically vast and culturally diverse. That is, how did Sinitic China become holistic China?

As a coherent and shared Sinitic culture emerged out of the ancient regional cultures of the Central Plain, beyond the “courts in the center” was a complex world of many divergent and often very local peoples and cultures.