Introduction China represents the only major civilization whose cultural foundations extend roughly five millennia into the past, whose written historical record spans more than three millennia, and whose state institutions have exhibited recognizable continuity since the imperial unification of 221 BCE. While the political form of the Chinese state has repeatedly disintegrated and reconstituted itself across more than two millennia, the underlying civilizational framework—it

When I visited Victor Hugo’s house at Place des Vosges in Paris , for the first time in 1996, I expected to feel the dense atmosphere of French literary grandeur, something between Voltairean satire and Napoleonic ambition. After all, Hugo was once an admirer of Napoleon I and a Republican in the lineage of Enlightenment humanism. Yet the room that welcomed me was not overtly French. It was filled with Chinese objects. I was surprised. When I visited the house again in 2023,