520 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



jew's-harp class. There was also the plow, or perhaps rather its fore- 

 runner, a two-pointed spade especially adapted for working in flooded 

 fields. The religion seems to have been a combination of ancestor- 

 worship and of a fertility cidt with oflterings of swine. The latter 

 are in contrast to those of horses and cattle which characterized the 

 Western Culture and to the difl'erent type of cattle-sacrifice found in 

 the Coastal Culture. Among myths seems to have been one which 

 told of the separation of Heaven and Earth, regarded as a wedded 

 pair. This, however, is not quite certain ; this particular myth may have 

 belonged originally to the more primitive culture of the Li people. 



6. The Coastal Culture is by far the most important of all the early 

 ones, especially when we take into consideration regions outside of 

 China itself but adjacent thereto. Its bearers were a people called the 

 Yiieh, who, it would seem, were essentially Indonesians. They appear 

 as living by the sea, with whose ways they were very familiar; and they 

 had a well-developed art of navigation. Chinese sources state that 

 they had also settled in southern Korea as well as in the Chinese pro- 

 vince of Shantung; while recent investigations concerning Japan suggest 

 that in that country, too, the Yiieh people had settled rather densely in 

 certain areas. 



The center of the Yiieh Culture lay in the province of Chekiang, in 

 the neighborhood of the sacred mountain Kuei-chi, about which re- 

 volve all their origin-myths. In regard to this culture the written 

 records mention so many characteristic traits, of the most diverse 

 origin, that it can clearly be shown not to have had a single origin but 

 to have been composed of elements from a variety of sources. This 

 leads us to suspect that all the other early cultures enumerated above 

 would also show a similar multiple origin, were it not for the fact that 

 the available literary evidence in regard to them is far more scanty in 

 amount. On account of this defect in our knowledge, however, we are 

 unable to determine the true degree of their complexity. Hence we 

 inevitably tend to oversimplify them and to consider them as derived 

 from a single source. This, of course, includes the Northern and the 

 Southern Cultures already mentioned, in each of which we can detect 

 traces of several still older and quite distinct cultures. In the Coastal 

 Culture this becomes at once definitely apparent. For in it we find, 

 together with culture-elements quite compatible Avith the character 

 of a seafaring coastal people, othei*s apparently better suited to lull 

 dwellers, and also still a third group more in conformity with the 

 culture pattern of a plains-dwelling folk with a more advanced type of 

 agriculture. 



As typical of this Coastal Culture we may mention the follomng 

 traits: A developed navigation ; the practice of holdmg boat races, with 

 its outgrowth the dragon-boat festival; the use of bronze drums 

 decorated in a way showing connection with that rite; and the concept 



