A History of China | Page 7

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 Yüeh 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