Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/19

 Twenty-five hundred years ago, when Confucius and Laotzu flourished, China was already a very old country. Although the celebrated Stone Drums in the Confucian Temple in Peking, which are said to record the hunting adventures of an emperor of the Chou dynasty ( 876), show the most ancient writing known, it is probable that the transition from tying knots on cords, as a means of conveying ideas, to cutting notches on wood and finally to writing pictorial and ideographic symbols, took place many centuries earlier. The conception of a central kingship was certainly well-fixed by the time of the first emperors of the Hsia dynasty ( 2200); and Confucius, writing in the sixth century before Christ on the discontents of the age, constantly bewails the spacious days of the legendary rulers Yao and Shun, who ruled as shepherd kings anterior to the Hsia. Remembering how much older the human race is to-day admitted to be than was believed a generation ago, it is by no means improbable that the Chinese entered the Yellow River valley at least a hundred centuries ago.

This ancient people of the pre-Christian era was a small, warring community of not more than a few million souls. Distributed along the loess soil of the broad, central valleys, their ex-