For more than two millennia, China understood the world through the civilizational concept of Tianxia—“All Under Heaven—viewing itself as the center of civilization and the cultural heart of an East Asian order shaped by hierarchy, ritual, and Confucian values. oblivious of the rise of Western industrial and maritime powers in the nineteenth century. It was not until China’d defeat in The Opium War of 1840 that China realized the global balance of civilization and power had fundamentally changed. As the old Tianxia order began to crumble, a generation of Chinese pioneers crossed oceans in search of knowledge, enlightenment, science, and technology, determined to forge a path toward modernity and national rebirth. From Yung Wing, the first Chinese graduate of Yale University, to Guo Songtao, China’s first minister to Britain, to Yan Fu, who introduced Western thought and modern philosophy to China, and finally to Cheng Zhen Jun’s generation of Republican modernizers, A historic chain of Chinese pioneers journeyed abroad in a profound civilizational quest for science and enlightenment—the first and perhaps hardest effort to rescue and reinvent China, and to reclaim its place in the modern world.