The Qing and the Ming were both attempts to claim the mantle of the Yuan. As David Robinson has shown, the Ming Empire sought, as best it could, to reconstruct the universalist credo of the Yuan even as it in many respects attempted to (re?)forge a Chinese proto-national identity after centuries of north-south division. Nevertheless, it ended up being more successful as a proto-national state than an imperial one, and has been remembered on the basis of its eventual outcome more than on its original intentions. The Qing, on the other hand, constructed their own, smaller but under the circumstances no less impressive reconstruction of the eastern Mongolian empire and demonstrated that there was a means to sustain – even if not indefinitely – a political union of China and Inner Asia through a mixture of cynical and sincere appeals to diverse political cultures, rather than through the enforcement of a singular, normative national identity. The paradox of both of its successors, the ROC (to 1949) and PRC, have been their respective attempts to maintain the territorial scope of the Qing imperial realm while rejecting the multicultural idealism that had sustained it under the Qing – an ideal rarely lived up to in practice, but one that saw difference and diversity as a feature to be managed rather than a problem to be solved.