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.
252. Growth and Spread of Chinese Civilization
Chou China at first embraced most of Shensi and Honan, southern Shansi and Chihli, and western Shantung. It was feudal, and practically as separatist as mediæval Germany. The chief functions of the over-king were to perform sacrifices, to admonish the kings and princes, and to govern his small dynastic domain. Unity lay not so much in an effective organization as in an idea, the feeling of a common race and especially of a common civilization. This idea has persisted to the present. It is adhesion to the culture of China, to its deep roots, its permanence, its humanities, that has always made Chinamen feel themselves Chinamen; has in fact sooner or later turned into Chinamen all alien elements, whether they were intrusive conquerors or primitive folk, that came to be included within the limits of the realm. In this way common customs and ideals already united the dozen or more larger Chou states and hundreds of dependencies; and chronic internal warfare did not prevent this era from being the age of Confucius, Laotse, Mencius and the other great sages that from the sixth to the fourth centuries formulated the typical Chinese character and attitude.
During the latter part of the Chou period began a gradual reduction of the number of feudal states, due to the larger swallowing the smaller. By the middle of the third century, two of these had emerged as preponderant: Ts’in in the west, centering about the Wei valley, and Ch’u on the south, along the middle Yangtse. Both were frontier states, less cultivated and hardier than the others, and regarded as barbarian or only half Chinese. Ts’in may have included some Hunnish absorptions; Ch’u very likely represented the rule of a Chinese dynasty over a native population whose original affiliations may have been either with the non-Sinitic Anamese of to-day, with the Shan-Siamese division, or with some closer branch of the Sinitic family, but who were gradually assimilating the culture and speech of the northern old China. At last, in 223 B.C., Ch’u fell before Ts’in, and within two years the remaining states in the northeast collapsed. For the first time China, from nearly its present frontier to south of the Yangtse, was effectively under one active ruler, Shi Hwang-ti, the “first emperor.” His dynasty crumbled almost at his death, but only to be succeeded by the famous Han line, under which, in the two centuries before and the two after Christ, China extended, consolidated, and prospered. The boundaries of the empire were pushed, in name at least, to virtually their present limits; and though political control may often have been slight, cultural influence progressed rapidly south of the Yangtse, much as Gaul became Romanized at the same time. Even the survival of half-independent barbarian groups here and there in the south and west has its parallel in the persistence of Keltic speech in French Brittany. By the seventh to ninth centuries after Christ, when the empire flourished once more under the Tang dynasty, the mass of southern China may be considered to have been substantially assimilated. Even the southern coast, which was the last area to be integrated, and which retains to-day the greatest dialectic differentiations and autonomous tendencies, had become part of the Chinese polity and civilization. The consequence was that when in the thirteenth century the Mongols and in the seventeenth the Manchus conquered the empire, they accomplished little more than the overthrow of one dynasty by another. The course of Chinese culture went on undisturbed, as it had in several previous historic periods when half of the realm passed temporarily under the sway of nomads or barbarians from the north.