251. China
China, far from Europe and known to the outside world only recently, possesses a civilization so different from ours in a multitude of aspects, that thought of connection between the cultures seems at first unreasonable. One thinks of rice, pagodas, bound feet, queues, silk, tea, ancestor worship, a strange, chopped, singing speech, and writing in still stranger characters. Yet the Chinese have long had a civilization identical in many of its constituents with our own: civil government, rimed poetry, painting, trousers, wheat and barley, our common domestic animals, bronze and iron, for instance. Since most of these culture elements are wanting in Africa and Oceania, as well as in native America, there is no inherent reason why they should be expectable in China. Their repetition in China and in the West as the result of independent causes would be remarkable. Evidently many if not all of this group of common traits represent absorptions into the civilization of China, or diffusions out of it into the West, much as the larger part of early European civilization was imported out of the nearer Orient.
In the broader perspective of culture history, then, China no longer stands aloof. The roots of her civilization are largely the same as those of our own. In this light, understanding of Chinese civilization involves two steps. The first is the tracing of the elements derived from the west or imparted to it. The second is the recognition of how these were remodeled and combined with elements of local growth and thereby given their peculiarly Chinese cast and setting.
Authentic historical records of China go back only three thousand years, and her archæology is little known. Beyond the beginning of the Chou dynasty, about 1100 B.C., or more exactly, beyond a point when this dynasty was about three centuries old, in 827 B.C., the Chinese possess only legendary history, in which slight strands of fact are interwoven with fabricated or fabulous constituents. Then, too, the Chinese have long been genuinely more advanced than their neighbors, than all of their world, in fact; with the result that they could hardly escape the conviction of their own superiority and self-sufficiency, and the belief that they had devised almost everything in their own culture. This presumption led to the conscientious manufacture by native historians of dates for inventions which were really made outside of China.
Beginning, then, in the ninth century B.C., we find the Chinese a settled and populous people in the lower valley of the great Yellow river, in what is now the northeastern corner of the “Eighteen Provinces” or China proper, from about Si-an-fu to Peking. They may have come from middle Asia or still farther west by a national migration, as has sometimes been conjectured: there is nothing to show that they did, and a great deal to suggest that they had lived in or near their seats of that period long before. It is difficult to imagine that the Chinese could have moved out of central Asia without leaving a part of their number behind, or without leaving conspicuous traces of their culture among their former neighbors. Of this there is no evidence. For one of the most advanced peoples of its time to remove itself and its civilization complete and unimpaired would be without parallel in history, and indeed is inconceivable as soon as one turns from the vague idea to face specific details of the process.
Nevertheless the Chinese as we first know them had the principal grains and tamed animals, the metals and plow and wheel of contemporary Eastern Asia and Europe. While it is scarcely thinkable that this great complex of culture traits should not have been due to connections with the west, there is every probability that these connections were of the sort that have been traced so frequently in foregoing pages: diffusions unaccompanied by populational drifts, or at least in the main independent of them. When it is recalled that western Turkistan held cereal-growing and animal-raising inhabitants far back in the Neolithic, and that the Bronze period is definitely represented in Siberia,[36] such transmission will not seem far fetched. It is also well to remember that all through the historic period central Asia contained farming populations, cities, traders, and skilled artisans, some measure of which evidences of higher culture it is only necessary to project a few thousand years backward to complete the link in the cultural chain between China and the west. We tend to overlook this fact because it is the transient Hun and Mongol invasions that chiefly obtrude into both western and Chinese history. Whenever the nomads ceased boiling over, they receded from the historians’ view. Obviously they could not have migrated and fought and burnt and slain among each other continuously. The more settled life at home, which they led most of the time, and into which they were always inclined to take over the religion, writing, and arts of the Orient, India and China, is the phase of their existence most likely to be overlooked, but which, from the point of view of the history of civilization, is far more important than their evanescent conquests. In this underlying phase they were the connectors of Near and Far East.
It is interesting in this connection that so far as more recent transmissions between China and the west are datable or positively traceable, they took place chiefly by the long land route through central Asia. The first trade between the Roman empire and China of the Han dynasty was overland; so was the introduction of Buddhism and cotton from India. In each case sea communication came later. It was scarcely before Mohammedan times that ocean trade between China and the west became important.
On the other hand, the Chinese and other east Asiatics always lacked, and still lack, several aspects of the grain-cattle-horse-wheel-metals cluster that are very ancient and practically universal in Europe, the Near East, and even central Asia. They do not use milk or its products, wool, nor bread-leaven. It has been suggested that the cluster was transmitted to China before these traits had been added to it; and that when they finally might have reached China, they found its people satisfactorily established in a culture containing substitutes for these traits, and therefore resistive to them.
It is significant that even to-day northern China, within which the oldest known China lay, still cultivates wheat, barley, and millet, and breeds cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and swine, as did the Swiss lake-dwellers; whereas in southern China the typical grain and animal are rice and the buffalo, as in Indo-China and Malaysia. There are evidently two fundamentally distinct economic systems here, characteristic respectively of Europe and west and north Asia, and of southeastern Asia; and evolving in the main independently. The first civilized China, that of the Chou period, that which produced Confucius as its literary standardizer, and has chiefly shaped Chinese traditions and institutions ever since, belonged to the great northern and western cycle; was in fact its easternmost outpost.
This brings up the question whether Chinese writing could not also have sprung from a western source, notably the Sumerian Cuneiform, which it superficially resembles in its linear, non-pictorial strokes, and in its mixed ideographic-phonetic method. The connection has indeed been asserted, but no satisfactory evidence of specific correspondences has been adduced. The most that it seems valid to maintain is that a remote connection is thinkable; a connection not extending beyond a limited number of characters or the idea or method of writing. The earliest Chinese characters preserved on bronzes are nearly two thousand years younger than the most ancient inscriptions of the system which developed into the classic Cuneiform. Both systems are fairly crystallized when they first come to our knowledge. Their formative stages, in which such connection as they might have would be most apparent, are obscure. It is well to remember that Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic, which were virtually contemporaneous and much nearer to each other geographically, have not yet been brought into specific relation as regards their origins.