514 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



able, through natural increase in numbers and by a process of absorp- 

 tion, to spread it gradually over the whole of what is today the 

 Chinese area. 



Ethnologists have looked with distrust on both the latter groups 

 of theories, and these have indeed been unable to find any real support. 

 Everything that we know about the way in which civilizations have 

 grown up in other parts of the world forbids us to believe that in 

 China alone the process of culture-buUding was as simple as is implied 

 by cither of the two above views. Moreover, the books written by 

 their advocates would give their readers the impression that the 

 Chinese civilization of the second and first millenniums before our 

 era had already acquired a uniformity of character in no way essen- 

 tially different from that which it has today. From this belief has 

 sprung the strange notion that the Chinese civilization displays a 

 stability unexampled elsewhere, and with a total lack of any tendency 

 toward evolutionary change. 



Now, to the trained ethnologist who travels through the interior of 

 China it quickly becomes apparent that there exist at the present 

 day in that country, often even in quite small areas, very great 

 differences in culture. Such differences can only be explained by the 

 assumption that this or that region has held fast with varying degrees 

 of conservatism to its own ancient customs and individual peculiarities. 

 These obviously go back to very old local cultures. The latter must 

 have been even more strongly marked 2,000 or 3,000 years ago than 

 is the case today.' 



Here at the outset we must recognize clearly that the sinologists 

 who maintain either of the two above-mentioned theories have acted 

 on the following principle; that is, they have made indiscriminate use 

 of all statements in the Chinese hterature which bear in any way 

 upon cultural development, without first considering to what par- 

 ticular part of China any given statement may refer. Now, nearly 

 every such passage states explicitly the place of which it speaks; but 

 such information has not so far been taken into account. Yet no 

 matter what the results sought for, statements of this sort are the very 

 first to which attention should be paid. The same applies with equal 

 force to the study of hnguistics. The still youthful science of Chinese 

 pliilology has tried to reconstruct the pronunciation of Old and 

 Middle Chinese. In so doing, however, it has tacitly assumed that 

 throughout the country a given character was pronounced in the same 

 way and has passed through a precisely similar course of development. 

 Yet in opposition to this quite unwarranted assumption are the facts 

 that even at the present day the Chinese spoken in various parts of 



> Regarding these survivals of ancient local cultures, recognizable even today, see W. Eberhard: On the 

 structure of a central Chinese local culture (Zur Struktur elnermittolchinesischen Lokalkultur), Artibus 

 Asiae, vol. 7, 1937. 



