ABSTRACT
These 370 years brings us to the most glorious period of China's history, the time when China reached its greatest extension before the eighteenth century, when China became known to the Western world as a centre of civilization. To this day, Chinese in some parts of the world still call themselves ‘T'ang-jen’, people of the Tang (dynasty). This is at the same time the climax of gentry society. The rule of northern tribal federations with their strong ideas of aristocracy and nobility, had its influence upon the Chinese gentry and we will see this in the following chapters. But after three hundred years of glory, a new world began to emerge, in which the gentry as we knew it disintegrated and disappeared to make room for a gentry of different type and a different society. It is always somewhat arbitrary to cut history into periods, and the last seventy or so years of this period can be and have been regarded as the period of the emergence of the new society or as the end of the old one.
