10. China's Han Dynasty - The First Empire in Flames
Fall of Civilizations Podcast
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The Heart of All Goodness
In ancient chinese conceptions of the world, the lands between the yangsi and the yellow river were the heart of all goodness. This was conveyed using the word hashi, a word that contains a sense of grandness and beauty. One text called the book of documents, dated around 500 b c, contains a particularly precise version of this world view. It describes how the virtue of the land's inhabitants reduces in steady increments of 500 lie or about 400 kilometers, the further you get from the centre.
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