Encoded in the ritual, then, was a bigger truth, which reached the very heart of the beliefs of Chinese civilisation. In his use of certain words – heaven (tian), ‘the Way’ (dao), monarch (wang) – the emperor embodied Chinese ideas about order and rulership that had developed since the fourth millennium BCE, and which still persisted despite the sudden rapid inroads of Western modernity in his time; the ancient concept of heaven as both a supreme deity that oversees the realm of human affairs, but also the ultimate cosmic reality, the impartial laws of the universe.
