Orient

The Orient is a term referring to the East in relation to Europe, traditionally comprising anything belonging to the Eastern world.

This term meant the west (where the sun sets) but has fallen into disuse in English, in favour of "Western world".

Over time, the common understanding of "the Orient" has continually shifted eastwards, as European people travelled farther into Asia.

Travellers may again take the Orient Express train from Paris to its terminus in the European part of Istanbul, a route established in the early 20th century.

During the 1800s, India, and to a lesser extent China, began to displace the Levant as the primary subject of Orientalist research, while the term also appears in mid-century works to describe an appearance or perceived similarity to "Oriental" government or culture, such as in Tolstoy's 1869 novel War and Peace, in which Napoleon, upon seeing the "oriental beauty" of Moscow, calls it "That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy Moscow!

[7] As late as 1957 Karl Wittfogel included Rome and the Incan Empire in his study of what he called Oriental Despotism, demonstrating the term still carries a meaning in Western thought that transcends geography.

Today, the term primarily evokes images of China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Mongolia, and peninsular Southeast Asia.

Because of historical discrimination against Chinese, Korean and Japanese, in some parts of the United States, some people consider the term derogatory.

Examples include the "oriental" and "occidental" provinces of Mindoro and Negros in the Philippines, and the French département of Pyrénées-Orientales.

In 1978, the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said published his influential and controversial book, Orientalism, and used the term to describe a pervasive Western tradition, both academic and artistic, of prejudiced outsider interpretations of the Arab and Muslim worlds that has been shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and the 19th centuries.

[10] In British English, the term Oriental is sometimes still used to refer to people from East and Southeast Asia (such as those from China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar, Mongolia, Philippines and Indonesia).

[11] Judges in the United Kingdom have been issued with guidelines to encourage political correctness where oriental should be avoided because it is imprecise and may be considered racist or offensive.

[14] "Orientals" refers exclusively to people of East and Southeast Asian origin, who constitute approximately 0.7% of the UK population as a whole.

[17] John Kuo Wei Tchen, director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at New York University, said the basic criticism of the term began in the U.S. during a cultural shift in the 1970s.

In contrast, regions of Asia further East, outside of the cultural domination of Abrahamic religions, do not share these same historical associations, giving way for the term "oriental" to have different connotations.