p]ARLY CHINESE CULTURES— EBERHARD 519 



they can have had only a very primitive form of agriculture, carried 

 on by burning clearings in the forest and then cultivating them with 

 the aid of digging-sticks. We must, however, exercise great caution in 

 trying to assign to them any typical cultural traits whatsoever; since 

 by the time when they first come within the purview of history, their 

 culture had already been so deeply overlaid and so greatly modified 

 by those both of the south and of the coast that it never appears 

 before us in its pure and unmixed state.^ 



The study of these two cultures, the Southern and the Coastal, 

 discloses that they share certain characteristics which can only be 

 explained as due to much mixture and overlaying and which are 

 probably, in part at least, the result of contacts with the Li Culture. 

 As long, however, as no researches have as yet been carried out along 

 these particular lines, I do not care to commit myself in regard to them. 



5. In central China, especially in what is now the Province of Hupei, 

 the Li Culture has been overlaid by that which we have called the 

 Southern. This becomes evident when we observe that the bearers of 

 the latter culture were by habit valley dwellers, while the Li people, 

 as food gatherers, preferred living in the hills. In this way it is quite 

 possible for two such different groups to live close to each other in the 

 same district, with only a very slow intermingling of their two culture 

 patterns. We have instances of just such a state of affairs even 

 today in southern China and especially in Yunnan. 



The extent of the Southern Culture must, however, have been 

 far greater than the above would suggest. Its former existence may 

 with certainty be ascribed to southern and western Honan, to western 

 Shantung, to Anhui, parts of Kiangsu, Kiangsi, and Kuangtung, and 

 also to the whole of Hunan. Its bearers seem to have belonged to that 

 T'ai stock still to be found in scattered groups over South China and 

 Farther India. They appear to have had a wet-rice culture, associated 

 with irrigation and the keeping of water buffaloes and cattle. Their 

 former extension can be clearly detected in the distribution of myths 

 dealing with the origin of rice and of cattle, and of others in which the 

 ox appears as a beast-helper (cf. the stories of the Cinderella and the 

 Swan Maiden type). To this Southern Culture, too, belong the myths 

 which portray the river-god in the form of an ox. 



Typical of the same culture seem also to be the terraced fields of 

 rammed earth (t'ai), later made of rough stonework; offerings of grain 

 (later of bread) cast upon the rivers; and an agrarian sprmg festival. 

 Among musical instruments appears especially the mouth-organ or 



' Here belongs the problem of the Miao and the Yao, two aboringinal peoples of South China; into this, 

 however, we cannot enter here. There seem nevertheless to be definite indications that while these peoples 

 differ from each other, they are both Austroasiatics, influenced in diflerent ways — the Miao mainly by the 

 T'ai peoples, the Yao on the other hand rather by the Coastal or Yiieh Culture. There was perhaps still 

 another ethnic element in southern China, the Negrito; a dark-skinned group of short stature, still living 

 in some parts of Malaya and the Philippine Islands. So far, however, the evidence is not sufllciently 

 definite to warrant our setting them up as a separate group in China, 



