Myths and Legends of China | Page 2

if long settled in a land which was
their home and that of their forefathers, but an alien race fighting with
wild beasts, clearing dense forests, and driving back the aboriginal
inhabitants.
Setting aside several theories (including the one that the Chinese are
autochthonous and their civilization indigenous) now regarded by the
best authorities as untenable, the researches of sinologists seem to
indicate an origin (1) in early Akkadia; or (2) in Khotan, the Tarim
valley (generally what is now known as Eastern Turkestan), or the
K'un-lun Mountains (concerning which more presently). The second
hypothesis may relate only to a sojourn of longer or shorter duration on
the way from Akkadia to the ultimate settlement in China, especially
since the Khotan civilization has been shown to have been imported
from the Punjab in the third century B.C. The fact that serious mistakes
have been made regarding the identifications of early Chinese rulers

with Babylonian kings, and of the Chinese _po-hsing_ (Cantonese
_bak-sing_) 'people' with the Bak Sing or Bak tribes, does not exclude
the possibility of an Akkadian origin. But in either case the
immigration into China was probably gradual, and may have taken the
route from Western or Central Asia direct to the banks of the Yellow
River, or may possibly have followed that to the south-east through
Burma and then to the north-east through what is now China--the
settlement of the latter country having thus spread from south-west to
north-east, or in a north-easterly direction along the Yangtzu River, and
so north, instead of, as is generally supposed, from north to south.
Southern Origin Improbable
But this latter route would present many difficulties; it would seem to
have been put forward merely as ancillary to the theory that the
Chinese originated in the Indo-Chinese peninsula. This theory is based
upon the assumptions that the ancient Chinese ideograms include
representations of tropical animals and plants; that the oldest and purest
forms of the language are found in the south; and that the Chinese and
the Indo-Chinese groups of languages are both tonal. But all of these
facts or alleged facts are as easily or better accounted for by the
supposition that the Chinese arrived from the north or north-west in
successive waves of migration, the later arrivals pushing the earlier
farther and farther toward the south, so that the oldest and purest forms
of Chinese would be found just where they are, the tonal languages of
the Indo-Chinese peninsula being in that case regarded as the languages
of the vanguard of the migration. Also, the ideograms referred to
represent animals and plants of the temperate zone rather than of the
tropics, but even if it could be shown, which it cannot, that these
animals and plants now belong exclusively to the tropics, that would be
no proof of the tropical origin of the Chinese, for in the earliest times
the climate of North China was much milder than it is now, and
animals such as tigers and elephants existed in the dense jungles which
are later found only in more southern latitudes.
Expansion of Races from North to South
The theory of a southern origin (to which a further serious objection

will be stated presently) implies a gradual infiltration of Chinese
immigrants through South or Mid-China (as above indicated) toward
the north, but there is little doubt that the movement of the races has
been from north to south and not vice versa. In what are now the
provinces of Western Kansu and Ssuch'uan there lived a people related
to the Chinese (as proved by the study of Indo-Chinese comparative
philology) who moved into the present territory of Tibet and are known
as Tibetans; in what is now the province of Yünnan were the Shan or
Ai-lao (modern Laos), who, forced by Mongol invasions, emigrated to
the peninsula in the south and became the Siamese; and in Indo-China,
not related to the Chinese, were the Annamese, Khmer, Mon, Khasi,
Colarains (whose remnants are dispersed over the hill tracts of Central
India), and other tribes, extending in prehistoric times into Southern
China, but subsequently driven back by the expansion of the Chinese in
that direction.
Arrival of the Chinese in China
Taking into consideration all the existing evidence, the objections to all
other theories of the origin of the Chinese seem to be greater than any
yet raised to the theory that immigrants from the Tarim valley or
beyond (_i.e._ from Elam or Akkadia, either direct or via Eastern
Turkestan) struck the banks of the Yellow River in their eastward
journey and followed its course until they reached the localities where
we first find them settled, namely, in the region covered by parts of the
three modern provinces of Shansi, Shensi, and Honan where their
frontiers join. They were then (about 2500