One essential attribute of our definition of statehood is fixed territoriality. Like the state itself, this is a relatively new phenomenon, one that is historically unique. The lineal, surveyed borders that separate contemporary states are a practice going back only to the seventeenth century. Territorial limits of most historical empires, traditional kingdoms, city-states, and tribal and lineage groups were mostly floating zones of indeterminate extent. Traditional Chinese conceptions of territory, for example, bore little relation to those that underlie the doctrines of contemporary international law. For them, territory was defined primarily in cultural terms. The Chinese world was one of hierarchy, with the Han civilization in the middle and the barbarians on the peripheries. Since there was constant intermingling and movement of populations, the exact location between centers and peripheries could not be established in lineal terms. Malcolm Anderson (1996: 88) explains:

China was typical of pre-modern polities in the sense that its rulers defined themselves primarily in terms of centers rather than peripheries.