Myths And Legends Of China E T C Werner by E. T. C. Werner instant download after payment.

Chinese people remains undetermined. We do not know who

they were nor whence they came. Such evidence as there is

points to their immigration from elsewhere; the Chinese

themselves have a tradition of a Western origin. The first

picture we have of their actual history shows us, not a people

behaving as if long settled in a land which was their home and

that 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

Chinese are autochthonous and their civilization indigenous) now

regarded by the best authorities as untenable, the researches of

sinologists seem 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). The second hypothesis may relate only

to a sojourn of longer or shorter duration on the way from

Akkadia to the ultimate settlement in China, especially since the

Khotan civilization has been shown to have been imported

from the Punjab in the third century B.C. The fact that serious

mistakes have been made regarding the identifications of early

Chinese rulers with Babylonian kings, and of the Chinese

po-hsing (Cantonese bak-sing) ‘people’ with the Bak Sing or

Bak tribes, does not exclude the possibility of an Akkadian

origin. But in either case the immigration into China was

probably Page 14

gradual, and may have taken the route from

Western or Central Asia direct to the banks of the Yellow

River, or may possibly have followed that to the south-east

through Burma and then to the north-east through what is

now China—the settlement of the latter country having thus

spread from south-west to north-east, or in a north-easterly

direction along the Yangtzŭ River, and so north, instead of, as

is generally supposed, from north to sou