Conclusion

This section has established that medieval East Asia did in fact have a discourse of ethnicity. Environmental determinism, which dominated the conceptualization of cultural variation in the medieval Sinosphere, was certainly not the same as the modern concept of ethnicity, but it is comparable in its “harder” forms, in which geographically determined cultural characteristics were regarded as inbred, inherent, and immutable, and almost always as inferior. In the Central Plains from the third to the sixth centuries, the discourse of environmental determinism saw a significant drift toward these “harder” forms, strengthening ethnic discourse and facilitating the ethnicization of cultural Others....