Middle Ages or Late Antiquity?

The periodization of Chinese history has been a thorny issue since the late nineteenth century, when European period labels or chronotypes such as ancient, medieval, and modern entered East Asian historiographic discourses together with notions of progress. Yet, while the trinity of ancient, medieval, and modern has found wide application in writings on European and non-European histories, in the case of China, dynastic periodization remains dominant. Even after Marxist historical materialism became orthodox in mainland China in 1949, historians continued to use dynasties as the basis of periodization. To rewrite history in developmental terms, East Asian historians around 1900 fell on tripartite periodization schemes from their own traditions to translate European period labels, while retaining the dynastic chronology as a basis. This article examines how the meaning of one particular and peculiar term, that of “middle antiquity” ( zhonggu ), changed from that of a late(r) or belated antiquity to that of a premature or precocious medieval period.

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .