Page:Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society - Volume 1.djvu/39

 is certainly extraordinary. I am inclined to think that the present rule for commencing the Chinese year, near the middle of Aquarius, has a reference to the position of the Winter Solstitial Colure at a remote period, though it would not be so far back as the reputed age of Chuen-hiŏ, but short of it by about six hundred years. From the circumstance of the Winter Solstice being at present observed as a festival, there is a possibility that it was at first the period of their year's commencement; though I mention this merely as a conjecture.

The only direct and positive testimony that we seem to possess, out of China, relating to the first origin of the Chinese nation, exists in the Institutes of Menu: and I cannot help thinking that the observations of Sir W. Jones on the passage in question are deserving of great attention. It is there written, that "many families of the military class, having gradually abandoned the ordinances of the Veda, and the company of Brahmens, lived in a state of degradation, as the Chinas and some other nations." The great antiquity of the laws of Menu is in favour of the authenticity of the above testimony; for at the period at which Sir W. Jones supposes them to have been written (above one thousand years B.C.), there can be no doubt whatever but the Chinese nation was yet in its infancy, and that it could lay no claim to the character of an extensive, united, and powerful empire, until many centuries after that date: as I shall attempt to shew. I content myself with noticing in this place the statement of one of their own histories, that twelve hundred years before Christ, "the Chinese nation was small and feeble, the eastern foreigners (that is, the aborigines, perhaps Tartars, between them and the east coast) numerous and strong," and that the former "gradually obtained a residence in the middle of the country," namely, in Honan. It is universally admitted among themselves, that the seat of government was at first in Shen-si, the north-west part of the present empire, where the colonists, mentioned by the Indian Lawgiver, are supposed to have settled, and that they subsequently carried on wars against a state called Yen, in Pĕ-chĕ-li, and another named Tsi, in Shan-tung, until they succeeded in fixing themselves in Honan.

The opinion, hazarded by M. de Guignes, that the Chinese were a colony from Egypt, seems hardly capable of being supported by sufficient proof. Such a distant and extensive emigration could not have taken place without