The Emperorship was absolutely central to Chinese history. This essay explores one dimension of the imperial polity. The Chinese Emperorship defined itself as ‘t'ien-hsia’(literally, “all under the Heaven”). This essay argues that t'ien-hsia is a type of polity and that we can interpret the characteristics of the Chinese Emperorship by analyzing the concepts that comprise t'ien-hsia. The key concept of t'ien-hsia is that the Son of the Heaven receives Heaven's mandate to rule the t'ien-hsia, and thereby the min (people) can earn a meaningful and compfortable livelihood. In the transition from the pre-Ch'in feudal system to the new polity of t'ien-hsia, the Chinese Emperorship needed to create a new type of relationship between the Emperorship and the people. This essay discusses how Confucian scholars and officials created a new theory of the Emperor-people relationship through interpretation of the Confucian canon. In the context of the Ch'in-Han period, the relationship between the Emperor and people should be understood in terms of its religious dimension, or as a higher fact reflecting the cosmological order. The function of the Chiao ceremony (state sacrifice in the suburb of the Capital) was precisely to create the Emperor-people relationship through its religious mechanism.