ABSTRACT
Historians, like the rest of us, are fond of order and structure. Periodisation of history is one way in which structure can be brought to an otherwise inchoate mass of events, people, trends and ideas. Thus in Western historiography we have the classical period, the medieval period, the renaissance, the Enlightenment; in China, history is divided up by periods of dynastic rule, each of which is usually book-ended by a period of invasion and/or civil strife.
