Sublime

China’s communications, as well as the managing of its fragile environment – dependent on water, threatened by floods – required an unusual degree of bureaucratic liaison between centre, province and district.

On the eve of the close encounter with the West, China’s distinctive political trajectory (still dominated by its symbiotic relationship with Inner Asia) propelled it not towards an all-powerful oriental despotism (imagined by Europeans) – which might have permitted drastic change in the face of external challenge – but instead still further toward

cultural products and social values: it was a difficult relationship to manage successfully. Once Japan began to run short of silver and the domestication

Japan had something different to offer: “Asia for the Asiatics.” That slogan may sound banal today, but for a region long colonized, it was a powerful, revolutionary idea. Even Romulo conceded that it was “morally unassailable.

Manchu adeptness in steppe diplomacy helped to turn Inner Mongolia into a buffer zone, and to drive China’s imperial power deep into Inner Asia. The northern inland threat to China’s stability was efficiently neutralized. With a once-disruptive Japan now safety withdrawn into neo-Confucian seclusion, and Confucianism firmly in command in Korea and

By this time, a division had already begun to appear between developed or affluent Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan) and developing Asia (the rest). Of

This vast realm of geographical ignorance reduced European activity in the Outer World to an archipelago of settlements, mines and trading depots connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort.