and subsequent Chinese sovereigns. The title "Son of Heaven" (;
Middle Chinese: ;
Old Chinese (
B-S): ) is attested earliest in
bronze inscriptions dated to the reign of
King Kang of Zhou. The rulers of
Goryeo used the titles of Holy Emperor-King () and Son of Heaven and positioned Goryeo at the center of the
Haedong (; "East of the Sea")
tianxia, which encompassed the historical domain of the "
Samhan", another name for the
Three Kingdoms of Korea. The title was also adopted in Vietnam, known in Vietnamese as
Thiên tử (
Chữ Hán: ). A divine mandate gave the Vietnamese emperor the right to rule, based not on his lineage but on his competence to govern. Vietnam's adoption of a Confucian bureaucracy, presided over by Vietnam's Son of Heaven, led to the creation of a Vietnamese tributary system in Southeast Asia, modeled after the Chinese
Sinocentric system in East Asia. == See also ==