The Evolution of a World Consciousness in Traditional Chinese Historiography.

This article discusses the changing perceptions of the world in traditional Chinese historiography. Since Sima Qian's Records of the Historian of the second century BCE, China has formed a worldview of "the central empire as the principal, the peripheries as subordinates". In the following two millenia years, three occurred three opportunities for altering the worldview. But all of them failed to materialize. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century and due to the Western challenge, that this worldview became fundamentally undermined. This change gave rise to a new worldview that entered textbook writing and became widely accepted from then on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]