The emphasis during this session will be on the way in which the entity that historians habitually call ‘China’ has been the subject of a number of radical cultural and political transformations over the last three thousand years. The intention is to sketch the broad processes and major factors that conditioned the changes discussed in the more detailed presentations that follow. The Qin unification of much of the East Asian land mass in 221 BCE marked more than just a change of political organisation. The new empire, continued under the Han, supported itself by the construction of social and intellectual frameworks that were to be seen as foundational for much of the time during the centuries that followed. An essential part of these frameworks was a new cosmology which structured the relations of human beings to nature, and of human beings to the society in which they lived.Air Max 90 Ultra BR