1 Sources for the earliest history
Until recently we were dependent for the beginnings of Chinese
history on the written Chinese tradition. According to these sources
China's history began either about 4000 B.C. or about 2700 B.C. with a
succession of wise emperors who “invented” the elements of a
civilization, such as clothing, the preparation of food, marriage, and
a state system; they instructed their people in these things, and so
brought China, as early as in the third millennium B.C., to an
astonishingly high cultural level. However, all we know of the origin
of civilizations makes this of itself entirely improbable; no other
civilization in the world originated in any such way. As time went on,
Chinese historians found more and more to say about primeval times. All
these narratives were collected in the great imperial history that
appeared at the beginning of the Manchu epoch. That book was translated
into French, and all the works written in Western languages until
recent years on Chinese history and civilization have been based in the
last resort on that translation.
Modern research has not only demonstrated that all these accounts
are inventions of a much later period, but has also shown why
such narratives were composed. The older historical sources make no
mention of any rulers before 2200 B.C., no mention even of their names.
The names of earlier rulers first appear in documents of about 400
B.C.; the deeds attributed to them and the dates assigned to them often
do not appear until much later. Secondly, it was shown that the
traditional chronology is wrong and another must be adopted, reducing
all the dates for the more ancient history, before 900 B.C. Finally,
all narratives and reports from China's earliest period have been dealt
a mortal blow by modern archaeology, with the excavations of recent
years. There was no trace of any high civilization in the third
millennium B.C., and, indeed, we can only speak of a real “Chinese
civilization” from 1300 B.C. onward. The peoples of the China of that
time had come from the most varied sources; from 1300 B.C. they
underwent a common process of development that welded them into a new
unity. In this sense and emphasizing the cultural aspects, we are
justified in using from then on a new name, “Chinese", for the peoples
of China. Those sections, however, of their ancestral populations who
played no part in the subsequent cultural and racial fusion, we may
fairly call “non-Chinese”. This distinction answers the question that
continually crops up, whether the Chinese are “autochthonons”. They are
autochthonons in the sense that they formed a unit in the Far East, in
the geographical region of the present China, and were not immigrants
from the Middle East.
2 The Peking Man
Man makes his appearance in the Far East at a time when remains in
other parts of the world are very rare and are disputed. He appears as
the so-called “Peking Man", whose bones were found in caves of
Chou-k'ou-tien south of Peking. The Peking Man is vastly different from
the men of today, and forms a special branch of the human race, closely
allied to the Pithecanthropus of Java. The formation of later races of
mankind from these types has not yet been traced, if it occurred at
all. Some anthropologists consider, however, that the Peking Man
possessed already certain characteristics peculiar to the yellow race.
The Peking Man lived in caves; no doubt he was a hunter, already in
possession of very simple stone implements and also of the art of
making fire. As none of the skeletons so far found are complete, it is
assumed that he buried certain bones of the dead in different places
from the rest. This burial custom, which is found among primitive
peoples in other parts of the world, suggests the conclusion that the
Peking Man already had religious notions. We have no knowledge yet of
the length of time the Peking Man may have inhabited the Far East. His
first traces are attributed to a million years ago, and he may have
flourished in 500,000 B.C.
3 The Palaeolithic Age
After the period of the Peking Man there comes a great gap in our
knowledge. All that we know indicates that at the time of the Peking
Man there must have been a warmer and especially a damper climate in
North China and Inner Mongolia than today. Great areas of the Ordos
region, now dry steppe, were traversed in that epoch by small rivers
and lakes beside which men could live. There were elephants,
rhinoceroses, extinct species of stag and bull, even tapirs and other
wild animals. About 50,000 B.C. there lived by these lakes a hunting
people whose stone implements (and a few of bone) have been found in
many places. The implements are comparable in type with the
palaeolithic implements of Europe (Mousterian type, and more rarely
Aurignacian or even Magdalenian). They are not, however, exactly like
the European implements, but have a character of their own. We do not
yet know what the men of these communities looked like, because as yet
no indisputable human remains have been found. All the stone implements
have been found on the surface, where they have been brought to light
by the wind as it swept away the loess. These stone-age communities
seem to have lasted a considerable time and to have been spread not
only over North China but over Mongolia and Manchuria. It must not be
assumed that the stone age came to an end at the same time everywhere.
Historical accounts have recorded, for instance, that stone implements
were still in use in Manchuria and eastern Mongolia at a time when
metal was known and used in western Mongolia and northern China. Our
knowledge about the palaeolithic period of Central and South China is
still extremely limited; we have to wait for more excavations before
anything can be said. Certainly, many implements in this area were made
of wood or more probably bamboo, such as we still find among the
non-Chinese tribes of the south-west and of South-East Asia. Such
implements, naturally, could not last until today.
About 25,000 B.C. there appears in North China a new human type,
found in upper layers in the same caves that sheltered Peking Man. This
type is beyond doubt not Mongoloid, and may have been allied to the
Ainu, a non-Mongol race still living in northern Japan. These, too,
were a palaeolithic people, though some of their implements show
technical advance. Later they disappear, probably because they were
absorbed into various populations of central and northern Asia. Remains
of them have been found in badly explored graves in northern Korea.
4 The Neolithic age
In the period that now followed, northern China must have gradually
become arid, and the formation of loess seems to have steadily
advanced. There is once more a great gap in our knowledge until, about
4000 B.C., we can trace in North China a purely Mongoloid people with a
neolithic culture. In place of hunters we find cattle breeders, who are
even to some extent agriculturists as well. This may seem an
astonishing statement for so early an age. It is a fact, however, that
pure pastoral nomadism is exceptional, that normal pastoral nomads have
always added a little farming to their cattle-breeding, in order to
secure the needed additional food and above all fodder, for the winter.
At this time, about 4000 B.C., the other parts of China come into
view. The neolithic implements of the various regions of the Far East
are far from being uniform; there are various separate cultures. In the
north-west of China there is a system of cattle-breeding combined with
agriculture, a distinguishing feature being the possession of finely
polished axes of rectangular section, with a cutting edge. Farther
east, in the north and reaching far to the south, is found a culture
with axes of round or oval section. In the south and in the coastal
region from Nanking to Tonking, Yuennan to Fukien, and reaching as far
as the coasts of Korea and Japan, is a culture with so-called
shoulder-axes. Szechwan and Yuennan represented a further independent
culture.
All these cultures were at first independent. Later the shoulder-axe
culture penetrated as far as eastern India. Its people are known to
philological research as Austroasiatics, who formed the original stock
of the Australian aborigines; they survived in India as the Munda
tribes, in Indo-China as the Mon-Khmer, and also remained in pockets on
the islands of Indonesia and especially Melanesia. All these peoples
had migrated from southern China. The peoples with the oval-axe culture
are the so-called Papuan peoples in Melanesia; they, too, migrated from
southern China, probably before the others. Both groups influenced the
ancient Japanese culture. The rectangular-axe culture of north-west
China spread widely, and moved southward, where the Austronesian
peoples (from whom the Malays are descended) were its principal
constituents, spreading that culture also to Japan.
Thus we see here, in this period around 4000 B.C., an extensive
mutual penetration of the various cultures all over the Far East,
including Japan, which in the palaeolithic age was apparently without
or almost without settlers.
5 The eight principal prehistoric cultures
In the period roughly around 2500 B.C. the general historical view
becomes much clearer. Thanks to a special method of working, making use
of the ethnological sources available from later times together with
the archaeological sources, much new knowledge has been gained in
recent years. At this time there is still no trace of a Chinese realm;
we find instead on Chinese soil a considerable number of separate local
cultures, each developing on its own lines. The chief of these
cultures, acquaintance with which is essential to a knowledge of the
whole later development of the Far East, are as follows:
(a) The north-east culture, centred in the present provinces
of Hopei (in which Peking lies), Shantung, and southern Manchuria. The
people of this culture were ancestors of the Tunguses, probably mixed
with an element that is contained in the present-day Paleo-Siberian
tribes. These men were mainly hunters, but probably soon developed a
little primitive agriculture and made coarse, thick pottery with
certain basic forms which were long preserved in subsequent Chinese
pottery (for instance, a type of the so-called tripods). Later,
pig-breeding became typical of this culture.
(b) The northern culture existed to the west of that culture,
in the region of the present Chinese province of Shansi and in the
province of Jehol in Inner Mongolia. These people had been hunters, but
then became pastoral nomads, depending mainly on cattle. The people of
this culture were the tribes later known as Mongols, the so-called
proto-Mongols. Anthropologically they belonged, like the Tunguses, to
the Mongol race.
(c) The people of the culture farther west, the north-west
culture, were not Mongols. They, too, were originally hunters, and
later became a pastoral people, with a not inconsiderable agriculture
(especially growing wheat and millet). The typical animal of this group
soon became the horse. The horse seems to be the last of the great
animals to be domesticated, and the date of its first occurrence in
domesticated form in the Far East is not yet determined, but we can
assume that by 2500 B.C. this group was already in the possession of
horses. The horse has always been a “luxury", a valuable animal which
needed special care. For their economic needs, these tribes depended on
other animals, probably sheep, goats, and cattle. The centre of this
culture, so far as can be ascertained from Chinese sources, were the
present provinces of Shensi and Kansu, but mainly only the plains. The
people of this culture were most probably ancestors of the later
Turkish peoples. It is not suggested, of course, that the original home
of the Turks lay in the region of the Chinese provinces of Shensi and
Kansu; one gains the impression, however, that this was a border region
of the Turkish expansion; the Chinese documents concerning that period
do not suffice to establish the centre of the Turkish territory.
(d) In the west, in the present provinces of Szechwan and in
all the mountain regions of the provinces of Kansu and Shensi, lived
the ancestors of the Tibetan peoples as another separate culture. They
were shepherds, generally wandering with their flocks of sheep and
goats on the mountain heights.
(e) In the south we meet with four further cultures. One is
very primitive, the Liao culture, the peoples of which are the
Austroasiatics already mentioned. These are peoples who never developed
beyond the stage of primitive hunters, some of whom were not even
acquainted with the bow and arrow. Farther east is the Yao culture, an
early Austronesian culture, the people of which also lived in the
mountains, some as collectors and hunters, some going over to a simple
type of agriculture (denshiring). They mingled later with the last
great culture of the south, the Tai culture, distinguished by
agriculture. The people lived in the valleys and mainly cultivated
rice.
The origin of rice is not yet known; according to some scholars,
rice was first cultivated in the area of present Burma and was perhaps
at first a perennial plant. Apart from the typical rice which needs
much water, there were also some strains of dry rice which, however,
did not gain much importance. The centre of this Tai culture may have
been in the present provinces of Kuangtung and Kuanghsi. Today, their
descendants form the principal components of the Tai in Thailand, the
Shan in Burma and the Lao in Laos. Their immigration into the areas of
the Shan States of Burma and into Thailand took place only in quite
recent historical periods, probably not much earlier than A.D. 1000.
Finally there arose from the mixture of the Yao with the Tai
culture, at a rather later time, the Yueeh culture, another early
Austronesian culture, which then spread over wide regions of Indonesia,
and of which the axe of rectangular section, mentioned above, became
typical.
Thus, to sum up, we may say that, quite roughly, in the middle of
the third millennium we meet in the north and west of
present-day China with a number of herdsmen cultures. In the south
there were a number of agrarian cultures, of which the Tai was the most
powerful, becoming of most importance to the later China. We must
assume that these cultures were as yet undifferentiated in their social
composition, that is to say that as yet there was no distinct social
stratification, but at most beginnings of class-formation, especially
among the nomad herdsmen.
[Illustration: Map 1. Regions of the principal local cultures in
prehistoric times. Local cultures of minor importance have not been
shown.]
6 The Yang-shao culture
The various cultures here described gradually penetrated one
another, especially at points where they met. Such a process does not
yield a simple total of the cultural elements involved; any new
combination produces entirely different conditions with corresponding
new results which, in turn, represent the characteristics of the
culture that supervenes. We can no longer follow this process of
penetration in detail; it need not by any means have been always
warlike. Conquest of one group by another was only one way of mutual
cultural penetration. In other cases, a group which occupied the higher
altitudes and practiced hunting or slash-and-burn agriculture came into
closer contacts with another group in the valleys which practiced some
form of higher agriculture; frequently, such contacts resulted in
particular forms of division of labour in a unified and often
stratified new form of society. Recent and present developments in
South-East Asia present a number of examples for such changes. Increase
of population is certainly one of the most important elements which
lead to these developments. The result, as a rule, was a stratified
society being made up of at least one privileged and one ruled stratum.
Thus there came into existence around 2000 B.C. some new cultures,
which are well known archaeologically. The most important of these are
the Yang-shao culture in the west and the Lung-shan culture in the
east. Our knowledge of both these cultures is of quite recent date and
there are many enigmas still to be cleared up.
The Yang-shao culture takes its name from a prehistoric
settlement in the west of the present province of Honan, where Swedish
investigators discovered it. Typical of this culture is its wonderfully
fine pottery, apparently used as gifts to the dead. It is painted in
three colours, white, red, and black. The patterns are all stylized,
designs copied from nature being rare. We are now able to divide this
painted pottery into several sub-types of specific distribution, and we
know that this style existed from c. 2200 B.C. on. In general,
it tends to disappear as does painted pottery in other parts of the
world with the beginning of urban civilization and the invention of
writing. The typical Yang-shao culture seems to have come to an end
around 1600 or 1500 B.C. It continued in some more remote areas,
especially of Kansu, perhaps to about 700 B.C. Remnants of this painted
pottery have been found over a wide area from Southern Manchuria,
Hopei, Shansi, Honan, Shensi to Kansu; some pieces have also been
discovered in Sinkiang. Thus far, it seems that it occurred mainly in
the mountainous parts of North and North-West China. The people of this
culture lived in villages near to the rivers and creeks. They had
various forms of houses, including underground dwellings and animal
enclosures. They practiced some agriculture; some authors believe that
rice was already known to them. They also had domesticated animals.
Their implements were of stone with rare specimens of bone. The axes
were of the rectangular type. Metal was as yet unknown, but seems to
have been introduced towards the end of the period. They buried their
dead on the higher elevations, and here the painted pottery was found.
For their daily life, they used predominantly a coarse grey pottery.
After the discovery of this culture, its pottery was compared with
the painted pottery of the West, and a number of resemblances were
found, especially with the pottery of the Lower Danube basin and that
of Anau, in Turkestan. Some authors claim that such resemblances are
fortuitous and believe that the older layers of this culture are to be
found in the eastern part of its distribution and only the later layers
in the west. It is, they say, these later stages which show the
strongest resemblances with the West. Other authors believe that the
painted pottery came from the West where it occurs definitely earlier
than in the Far East; some investigators went so far as to regard the
Indo-Europeans as the parents of that civilization. As we find people
who spoke an Indo-European language in the Far East in a later period,
they tend to connect the spread of painted pottery with the spread of
Indo-European-speaking groups. As most findings of painted pottery in
the Far East do not stem from scientific excavations it is difficult to
make any decision at this moment. We will have to wait for more and
modern excavations.
From our knowledge of primeval settlement in West and North-West
China we know, however, that Tibetan groups, probably mixed with
Turkish elements, must have been the main inhabitants of the whole
region in which this painted pottery existed. Whatever the origin of
the painted pottery may be, it seems that people of these two groups
were the main users of it. Most of the shapes of their pottery are not
found in later Chinese pottery.
7 The Lung-shan culture
While the Yang-shao culture flourished in the mountain regions of
northern and western China around 2000 B.C., there came into existence
in the plains of eastern China another culture, which is called the
Lung-shan culture, from the scene of the principal discoveries.
Lung-shan is in the province of Shantung, near Chinan-fu. This culture,
discovered only about twenty-five years ago, is distinguished by a
black pottery of exceptionally fine quality and by a similar absence of
metal. The pottery has a polished appearance on the exterior; it is
never painted, and mostly without decoration; at most it may have
incised geometrical patterns. The forms of the vessels are the same as
have remained typical of Chinese pottery, and of Far Eastern pottery in
general. To that extent the Lung-shan culture may be described as one
of the direct predecessors of the later Chinese civilization.
As in the West, we find in Lung-shan much grey pottery out of which
vessels for everyday use were produced. This simple corded or matted
ware seems to be in connection with Tunguse people who lived in the
north-east. The people of the Lung-shan culture lived on mounds
produced by repeated building on the ruins of earlier settlements, as
did the inhabitants of the “Tells” in the Near East. They were
therefore a long-settled population of agriculturists. Their houses
were of mud, and their villages were surrounded with mud walls. There
are signs that their society was stratified. So far as is known at
present, this culture was spread over the present provinces of
Shantung, Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Anhui, and some specimens of its
pottery went as far as Honan and Shansi, into the region of the painted
pottery. This culture lasted in the east until about 1600 B.C., with
clear evidence of rather longer duration only in the south. As black
pottery of a similar character occurs also in the Near East, some
authors believe that it has been introduced into the Far East by
another migration (Pontic migration) following that migration which
supposedly brought the painted pottery. This theory has not been
generally accepted because of the fact that typical black pottery is
limited to the plains of East China; if it had been brought in from the
West, we should expect to find it in considerable amounts also in West
China. Ordinary black pottery can be simply the result of a special
temperature in the pottery kiln; such pottery can be found almost
everywhere. The typical thin, fine black pottery of Lung-shan, however,
is in the Far East an eastern element, and migrants would have had to
pass through the area of the painted pottery people without leaving
many traces and without pushing their predecessors to the East. On the
basis of our present knowledge we assume that the peoples of the
Lung-shan culture were probably of Tai and Yao stocks together with
some Tunguses.
Recently, a culture of mound-dwellers in Eastern China has been
discovered, and a southern Chinese culture of people with impressed or
stamped pottery. This latter seems to be connected with the Yueeh
tribes. As yet, no further details are known.
8 The first petty States in Shansi
At the time in which, according to archaeological research, the
painted pottery flourished in West China, Chinese historical tradition
has it that the semi-historical rulers, Yao and Shun, and the first
official dynasty, the Hsia dynasty ruled over parts of China with a
centre in southern Shansi. While we dismiss as political myths the
Confucianist stories representing Yao and Shun as models of virtuous
rulers, it may be that a small state existed in south-western Shansi
under a chieftain Yao, and farther to the east another small state
under a chieftain Shun, and that these states warred against each other
until Yao's state was destroyed. These first small states may have
existed around 2000 B.C.
On the cultural scene we first find an important element of
progress: bronze, in traces in the middle layers of the Yang-shao
culture, about 1800 B.C.; that element had become very widespread by
1400 B.C. The forms of the oldest weapons and their ornamentation show
similarities with weapons from Siberia; and both mythology and other
indications suggest that the bronze came into China from the north and
was not produced in China proper. Thus, from the present state of our
knowledge, it seems most correct to say that the bronze was brought to
the Far East through the agency of peoples living north of China, such
as the Turkish tribes who in historical times were China's northern
neighbours (or perhaps only individual families or clans, the so-called
smith families with whom we meet later in Turkish tradition), reaching
the Chinese either through these people themselves or through the
further agency of Mongols. At first the forms of the weapons were left
unaltered. The bronze vessels, however, which made their appearance
about 1450 B.C. are entirely different from anything produced in other
parts of Asia; their ornamentation shows, on the one hand, elements of
the so-called “animal style” which is typical of the steppe people of
the Ordos area and of Central Asia. But most of the other elements,
especially the “filling” between stylized designs, is recognizably
southern (probably of the Tai culture), no doubt first applied to
wooden vessels and vessels made from gourds, and then transferred to
bronze. This implies that the art of casting bronze very soon spread
from North China, where it was first practiced by Turkish peoples, to
the east and south, which quickly developed bronze industries of their
own. There are few deposits of copper and tin in North China, while in
South China both metals are plentiful and easily extracted, so that a
trade in bronze from south to north soon set in.
The origin of the Hsia state may have been a consequence of the
progress due to bronze. The Chinese tradition speaks of the Hsia
dynasty, but can say scarcely anything about it. The excavations,
too, yield no clear conclusions, so that we can only say that it
flourished at the time and in the area in which the painted pottery
occurred, with a centre in south-west Shansi. We date this dynasty now
somewhere between 2000 and 1600 B.C. and believe that it was an
agrarian culture with bronze weapons and pottery vessels but without
the knowledge of the art of writing.