ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the projects to establish a sense of continuity between present and past in China and Britain. In the case of Britain, due to the fact that few issues challenged an image of the British past as a tale of progress, these projects were few and of minor importance. In China, however, these produced deep transformations motivated by the perception of external threat and internal weakness. In this context, erstwhile accepted assumptions such as the sacrality of the monarchy, the usefulness of the classical corpus, or even the veracity of the accounted past were increasingly questioned by historians.
