Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/18

 evidence not only of a settlement which may be counted at least six thousand years old but point to a close cultural connection with very distant regions. It may be that systematic search will some day disclose new and remarkable facts concerning Chinese origins in the cradle of the human race.

In any case it is quite certain that thirty centuries before the Christian era the Chinese had already occupied most of the territory comprised in the modern provinces of Kansu, Shensi, and Honan; that their route eastwards—towards the sea—was barred by forests may be assumed. It is interesting to record that their pictorial character for 'East' is a sun shining through trees, whilst the word 'obstruction' is compounded by placing the selfsame tree in a doorway. The remote ancestors of the race certainly cleared the land as they advanced, changing from a pastoral cultivator race, tilling the soil in small patches, into a purely agricultural nation at a time when classical Greece had not yet emerged out of the dim mists. The Chinese still venerate the name of the ruler who established tillage as the basic institution, and who rightly assumed that there is no increment so rich and so beneficial to mankind as the increment of the fields.