Zheng

A small central state in the Yellow River plain, squeezed between great powers and famous for its early legal code inscribed on bronze. By tradition it was the home of the Daoist sage Liezi, who was said to ride the wind: and whose book asks, again and again, whether the dreamer and the waking man can ever be sure which is which.

Zheng was small, well placed, and therefore permanently in somebody's way. It sat on the roads between the great powers of the plain and spent its history negotiating. In 536 BCE its minister Zi Chan had the penal code cast onto bronze vessels so that ordinary people could read the law instead of depending on a noble's judgement, a move conservatives denounced as the end of proper government. Liezi's book, full of dreamers and wind-riders, comes out of the same crowded and argumentative country.