Our perception of the spaces we live in are continuously changing. The character huan 寰 originally meant “a vast domain” but by the nineteenth century had acquired the additional meaning of “the world at large”. The author Wei Yuan 魏源 used the character in 1841, when he observed that the Chinese scholars of his age “were not yet aware of the vastness of the world” (wei du huan ying zhi da 未睹寰瀛之大). In Wei Yuan’s time, European imperialist powers were intensifying their East Asian operations, and Wei deemed it essential that his compatriots got a grasp of the rapidly integrating world space they now found themselves a part of. The need to familiarize ourselves with the vastness of the world, to equip us with the knowledge to understand how events taking place a world away reshape our own living space, existed in Wei Yuan’s time of imperialist expansion as much as it does today, in our current age of globalization.