Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. This article has been tagged since January 2007.

The term tributary state refers to one of the two main ways in which a pre-modern state might be subordinate to a more powerful neighbour. The heart of the relationship was that the tributary would send a regular token of submission (tribute) to the superior power. This token often took the form of a substantial transfer of wealth, such as the delivery of gold, produce or slaves, so that tribute might best be seen as the payment of protection money. Or it might be more symbolic: sometimes it amounted to no more than the delivery of a mark of submission such as the bunga mas (golden flower) that rulers in the Malay peninsula used to send to the kings of Siam. It might also involve attendance by the subordinate ruler at the court of the hegemon in order to make a public show of submission. Image File history File links Wiki_letter_w. ... A tribute (from Latin tribulum, contribution) is wealth one party gives to another as a sign of respect or, as was often case in historical contexts, of submission or allegiance. ... The Malay Peninsula (Malay: Semenanjung Tanah Melayu) is a major peninsula located in Southeast Asia. ... For the country formerly called Siam see Thailand SIAM is an acronym for Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. ...

A tributary state differed from a vassal state in that the most important obligation of a vassal state was to delivery military support upon request from the dominant power. A puppet state is a state whose government, though notionally of the same culture as the governed people - owes its existence (or other major debt) to being installed, supported or controlled by a more powerful entity, typically a foreign power. ...

Tributary relations normally involved no element of administrative control or interference by the hegemon. At most, the hegemonic power might intervene in succession issues and might ratify the accession of a monarch. For this reason, the extrapolation from pre-modern inter-state relations to the modern international system is problematic. The modern-day heirs of tribute hegemons tend to claim that the tributary relationship should be understood as an acknowledgement of the hegemon's sovereignty in the modern world, whereas former tributary states deny that there was any transfer of sovereignty. For instance, modern Chinese authorities have sometimes produced a  :List of tributaries of Imperial China which implies Chinese sovereign claim over territories not now regarded as Chinese. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ...

An unusually elaborate and formalized tribute system developed in East Asia. Historically, the Emperor of China saw himself as the emperor of the entire civilized world. It was not possible for such an emperor to have equal diplomatic relations with any other power, and so all diplomatic relations in the region were constructed by the Chinese as tributary. The disdain of the state ideology of Confucianism for trade, and the conceit that Chinese civilization had no need of products or technology from outside meant that trade, when it was permitted, was also constructed as tributary. Diplomatic missions and trading parties from non-Chinese regions were interpreted in Chinese records as being tributary, regardless of the intention of those regions. Under this construction, the goods received by China constituted a tributary offering, while those that the visitors received were interpreted as gifts that the emperor in his kindness had bestowed upon his distant tributaries. East Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms. ... The Emperor of China (Chinese: ; pinyin: ) was the title given to the rulers of China from the founding of the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC until the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912. ... An emperor is a (male) monarch, usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. ... All under heaven (Chinese: 天下; pinyin: tiān xi ) is a concept in Chinese history. ... Confucian temple in Jiading district, Shanghai. ...

In the Western colonial system, non-Western states were sometimes incorporated into a European empire as protectorates. This article is about states protected and/or dominated by a foreign power. ...

For modern forms of state subordination, see puppet state, satellite state and client state. A puppet state is a state whose government, though notionally of the same culture as the governed people - owes its existence (or other major debt) to being installed, supported or controlled by a more powerful entity, typically a foreign power. ... Satellite state or client state is a political term that refers to a country which is formally independent but which is primarily subject to the domination of another, larger power. ... According to the notion of client states, just as a client of a corporation remains dependent on the corporation for a continued supply of products, and just as it is in the companys interest to make expendable products which need to be replaced regularly, client states of the two...