Law, Territory, and Statehood: The Legal Conception of Guo in the Tang Code

This article reconsiders premodern Chinese statehood through a legal-philological analysis of the term guo 國 in the Tang Code. Existing scholarship has largely centered on another term, tianxia 天下 (“All under Heaven”), a cosmological expression of universalist rule that has led scholars to portray premodern Chinese notions of state authority as non-territorial. By contrast, this study shows that Tang legal conceptions of guo articulated state authority in jurisdictional and territorial terms. The Tang Code defined the polity as a bounded legal domain governed by codified regulations, guarded borders, and restricted mobility. This jurisdictional and territorial conception of rulership was embedded in the dual identities of Tang monarchs, who held the titles huangdi 皇帝 and tianzi 天子 to assert, respectively, domestic rule over a territorial realm and an outward claim to universalist authority. Through this layered conception of rulership, Tang law reveals how territoriality and universality coexisted within a single political order. Using the Tang as a case study, the article argues that premodern Chinese statehood cannot be reduced to cosmological universalism and that legal texts offer a critical yet underexplored window into the intellectual foundations of imperial governance across East Asia.