The Forbidden City: Isolationism In China

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The Chinese society has remained both individual and dynamic over the thousands of years. Most of China’s cultural development has been accomplished with little outside influences. Starting in 1420, the imperial family ruled China from behind the heavy walls of the Forbidden City. They lived in the far, northern quarters of the palace and ruled China’s 150 million citizens from there. This relative isolation from the rest of the world is what created the flowing refinement from the rest of Chinese culture over the centuries. The Forbidden City has been a symbol of Chinese isolationism throughout the ages, not only because the walls protect the government from the outside world, but also because the inner court separates the imperial family …show more content…

In some regions of China, especially the southwest, the country is separated into many different ethnic groups which are geographically intermixed. Because of language barriers and different economic structures, these people all maintain their own cultural traits and live in relative isolation from one another (Britannica Academic 2018, China). The imperial family lives within relative isolation from the citizens of China because of social class, wealth, and family heritage. This separation wasn't meant to isolate the people from each other, but simply keep everyone ¨where they belonged¨. This separation is what shaped China they way we know it today. The Chinese have viewed themselves many ways over their thousands of year existents. “All of the names imply that China is an entity of advanced culture identified with an ongoing civilization …. They viewed themselves as being more culturally advanced than their neighbors, as an island of civilization in the midst of a sea of “barbarians”’ (Embree 1988, 264). This is how they came up with the term Zhongguo which means “central states” or “middle kingdom” to refer to their homeland. They refer to China has the central or middle kingdom of the ancient world, yet within their own country, they split …show more content…

China had two main portals to the west. One by land, The Silk Road, and another by sea, a route through the Indian Ocean. One might think all this expansion by land and water would have made China less isolated and proved that they were looking for ways to expand their current culture and country. However, it instead shows that the Chinese were too ambitious and hoped to accomplish more than they were able to because the sea route was eventually shut down. After Admiral Zheng He returned from his last of seven remarkable ocean voyages, he returned in 1433 to find a change in policy. If it wasn't for this change, China could have come to rule the Southern Asian trading routes. Instead, “the government abandoned all maritime expansion” (Allen 2007, 26), and China turned in on itself and the route which was once so widely open, was taken over by European merchants. It could be reasonably contended that the Chinese were trading and venturing west as far as the countries on the Mediterranean Coast since the second century B.C.E, however The Silk Road remained in use only until 1453. This is almost 600 years to today and even though much of the development of China as a country was done with well before the 15th Century, China was just beginning to evolve out of

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