It would have been a stunning coincidence if Chinese had a straightforward equivalent of “nature,” partly because the term's European history is defiantly complex. Well before the middle of the twentieth century, however, this situation had changed. Anyone with passing knowledge of the languages can say without hesitation that the Chinese word for “nature” is ziran. It took some time to settle on this, of course. When Yan Fu – the late Qing social theorist and translator of Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley – summarized Darwin, he continued to use the language of heaven and earth to stand in for Darwin's nature. As Schwartz translates it: “Living things struggle among themselves in order to survive. Nature (lit., ‘heaven’) selects [among them] and preserves the superior species. It is his view that humans and living things are born within a given space and together feed on the environment (heaven and earth).”

Ziran had become the ruling translation for something like the Western meaning of “nature” by the 1920s. As with so many other technical terms from the social and natural sciences, China picked up this new use of the term from Japan, which had spearheaded the translation of Western concepts. A Japanese dictionary of 1924, for example, defines the term as (1) the opposite of “civilization,” “culture,” and “skill,” and (2) a totality of actual existence, as opposed to “spirit” and “history.”