Myths and Legends of China (Annotated)

This is an annotated version of the book1. contains an updated biography of the author at the end of the book for a better understanding of the text.2. This book has been checked and corrected for spelling errorsThe Sociology of the ChineseRacial OriginIn spite of much research and conjecture, the origin of the Chinesepeople remains undetermined. We do not know who they were nor whencethey came. Such evidence as there is points to their immigrationfrom elsewhere; the Chinese themselves have a tradition of a Westernorigin. The first picture we have of their actual history shows us, nota people behaving as if long settled in a land which was their home andthat of their forefathers, but an alien race fighting with wild beasts,clearing dense forests, and driving back the aboriginal inhabitants.Setting aside several theories (including the one that the Chineseare autochthonous and their civilization indigenous) now regardedby the best authorities as untenable, the researches of sinologistsseem to indicate an origin (1) in early Akkadia; or (2) in Khotan,the Tarim valley (generally what is now known as Eastern Turkestan),or the K'un-lun Mountains (concerning which more presently). Thesecond hypothesis may relate only to a sojourn of longer or shorterduration on the way from Akkadia to the ultimate settlement in China,especially since the Khotan civilization has been shown to havebeen imported from the Punjab in the third century B.C. The factthat serious mistakes have been made regarding the identificationsof early Chinese rulers with Babylonian kings, and of the Chinese_po-hsing_ (Cantonese _bak-sing_) 'people' with the Bak Sing or Baktribes, does not exclude the possibility of an Akkadian origin. Butin either case the immigration into China was probably gradual, andmay have taken the route from Western or Central Asia direct to thebanks of the Yellow River, or may possibly have followed that to thesouth-east through Burma and then to the north-east through what isnow China--the settlement of the latter country having thus spreadfrom south-west to north-east, or in a north-easterly direction alongthe Yangtzu River, and so north, instead of, as is generally supposed,from north to south.Southern Origin ImprobableBut this latter route would present many difficulties; it would seemto have been put forward merely as ancillary to the theory that theChinese originated in the Indo-Chinese peninsula. This theory isbased upon the assumptions that the ancient Chinese ideograms includerepresentations of tropical animals and plants; that the oldest andpurest forms of the language are found in the south; and that theChinese and the Indo-Chinese groups of languages are both tonal. Butall of these facts or alleged facts are as easily or better accountedfor by the supposition that the Chinese arrived from the northor north-west in successive waves of migration, the later arrivalspushing the earlier farther and farther toward the south, so that theoldest and purest forms of Chinese would be found just where they are,the tonal languages of the Indo-Chinese peninsula being in that caseregarded as the languages of the vanguard of the migration. Also, theideograms referred to represent animals and plants of the temperatezone rather than of the tropics, but even if it could be shown, whichit cannot, that these animals and plants now belong exclusively to thetropics, that would be no proof of the tropical origin of the Chinese,for in the earliest times the climate of North China was much milderthan it is now, and animals such as tigers and elephants existed in thedense jungles which are later found only in more southern latitudes.Expansion of Races from North to SouthThe theory of a southern origin (to which a further serious objectionwill be stated presently) implies a gradual infiltration of Chineseimmigrants