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This article offers a new account of the development of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. It argues that a collective Chinese belief in a “historic claim” to the reefs and rocks therein emerged in distinct episodes during the first half of the twentieth century, partly in response to perceived threats to the country’s sovereignty but mainly as attempts to shore up declining nationalist legitimacy. It situates the claim within efforts by Chinese intellectual and state elites to construct a national “geobody” in the first decades of the twentieth century. It argues that this was not a process of documenting a preexisting claim but of imagining and asserting one through the mobilization of both emotion and archival documents. Moreover, this account emphasizes the importance of the acquisition of knowledge from foreign sources and the confusion that entailed. The legacy of this confused claim-making shapes South China Sea geopolitics today.

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