Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/182

170 elaborate the idea themselves, and their past history goes to show that they must have brought it with them. The first place where Chinese civilisation can be detected is in the valley of the Wei, a tributary of the Hoang Ho or Yellow River. Their capital in early times was Siang-fu on the banks of the Wei, situated, so we are told by Laufer, near to important gold and jade mines. This makes it possible to suggest that the bearers of civilisation to China came there in search of gold and other precious substances. That these men came from elsewhere is strongly suggested by the fact that at Siang-fu there are some enormous pyramids, presumably of earth, with square bases of sides three hundred feet, monuments utterly unlike any others in China, except in Shantung, where there are also signs of early foreign influence. The Chinese, moreover, looked back to the Kwen-lun mountains as the place where lived the immortal queen of the west who had the magic peach-tree, and these mountains have long been the most important source of jade as well as containing much gold. So another people that believed in the Isles of the Blest and in the life-giving properties of certain substances appear to have chosen for their early settlements a region containing givers of life. This affords a natural explanation of the immense importance attached by them to gold and jade as well as to pearls and other substances.

If on a map be plotted out the early settlements of the Aryans in India and Afghanistan, as is given in Hopkins' Religions of India and the gold-bearing rivers in Lock's Gold, it will be found that the two coincide. We know further that the Aryans made their early settlements by the sides of the rivers. When therefore it is said in the Atharva Veda that gold was what "the men of old and their progeny sought," the writer was apparently only