He had never had cause to pronounce the name at all, until recently. 
Judge Fang was district magistrate for the Leased Territories, which in turn 
were part of the Chinese Coastal Republic. Dr. X almost never left the 
boundaries of Old Shanghai, which was part of a separate district; more to the 
point, he stuck to a small but anfractuous subregion whose tendrils were 
seemingly ramified through every block and building of the ancient city. On the 
map, this region looked like the root system of a thousand-year-old dwarf tree; 
its border must have been a hundred kilometers long, even though it was 
contained within a couple of square kilometers. This region was not part of the 
Coastal Republic; it styled itself as the Middle Kingdom, a living vestige of 
Imperial China, prohibitively the oldest and greatest nation of the world.