ABSTRACT
The rise of world history as a way of inquiry about China's position in the globalising human community was a major development in the country's intellectual culture at the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter analyses the process in which the transformation of the Confucian tradition contributed to the rise of world-historical consciousness through the confluence of the perspectives of temporality and spatiality. It examines the cases of Guo Songtao and Xue Fucheng, two early Chinese scholar-officials who visited Europe in the late nineteenth century. Liang Qichao famously stated four reasons for this demise: the focus of traditional Chinese historiography on the royal court over the nation, on the elites over the masses, on old things over the new and on details over big ideas. European missionaries introduced universal history as a way to place Europe on equal terms with China in historical time.
