The Penguin History of the World

We must begin with the land itself, and at first sight it does not suggest much that makes for unity. The physical theatre of Chinese history is vast. China today is bigger than the United States and now contains over four times as many people. The Great Wall, which came to guard the northern frontier, was in the end made up of 2,500–3,000 miles of fortifications, made over 1,700 years. From Beijing (Peking) to Guangzhou (Canton), more or less due south, is 1,200 miles as the crow flies. This huge expanse contains many climates and many regions. Above all, northern and southern China are very different. In summer the north is scorching and arid while the south is humid and used to floods; the north looks bare and dust-blown in the winter, while the south is always green. One of the major themes of early Chinese history is of the spread of civilization, by diffusion, migration or conquest, from north to south, and of the continual stimulation and irrigation of northern civilization by currents from the outside, from Mongolia and Central Asia.

China’s major internal divisions are set by mountains and rivers. Three great river systems drain the interior and run across the country roughly from west to east. They are, from north to south, the Yellow River, the Yangzi and the Pearl River and its tributaries. It is surprising that a country so vast and thus divided should form a unity at all. Yet China is isolated, too, a world by itself since long before the Pleistocene. Much of China is mountainous and except in the extreme south and north-east her frontiers still sprawl across and along great ranges and plateaux. The headwaters of the Yangzi, like those of the Mekong, lie in the high Kunlun, north of Tibet. These highland frontiers are great insulators. The arc they form is broken only where the Yellow River flows south into China from inner Mongolia and it is on the banks of this river, towards the eastern part of its present territory, that the story of civilization in China begins.

Skirting the Ordos desert, itself separated by another mountain range from the desolate wastes of the Gobi, the Yellow River opens a sort of funnel into north China. Through it have flowed people and soil; the loess beds of the river valley, easily worked and fertile, laid down by wind from the north, are the basis of the first large-scale Chinese agriculture. Once this region was richly forested and well watered, but it became colder and more desiccated in one of those climatic transformations which are behind so much primeval social change. To Chinese prehistory overall, of course, there is a bigger setting than one river valley. ‘Peking man’, a version of Homo erectus, turns up as a fire-user about 600,000 years ago, and there are Neanderthal traces in all three of the great river basins. The trail from these forerunners to the dimly discernible cultures which are their successors in early Neolithic times leads us to a China already divided into two cultural zones, with a meeting place and mixing area on the Yellow River. It is impossible to separate the tangle of cultural interconnections already detectable by that time. But there was no even progress towards a uniform or united culture. Against this varied background emerged settled agriculture; nomads and settlers were to coexist in China until our own day. Rhinoceros and elephant were still hunted in the north not long before 1000 BC.

As in other parts of the world, the coming of agriculture meant a revolution. In small sections of the area between the Yellow and the Yangzi rivers this happened not long after 9000 BC. In a much larger area people exploited vegetation to provide themselves with fibres and food. But this is still a topic about which much more needs to be known. Rice was being harvested in some areas along the Yangzi before the eighth millennium BC, and ground just above the flood-level of the Yellow River begins to yield evidence of agriculture (probably the growing of millet) around the same time. Somewhat like that of early Egypt, the first Chinese agriculture seems to have been exhaustive or semi-exhaustive. The land was cleared, used for a few years, and then left to revert to nature while the cultivators turned attention elsewhere. From what has been called the ‘nuclear area of North China’ forms of agricultural techniques can be seen later to spread north, west and south. Within it there soon appeared complex cultures, which combined with agriculture the use of jade and wood for carving, the domestication of silk-worms, the making of ceremonial vessels in forms which were to become traditional, and perhaps even the use of chopsticks. In other words, this was in Neolithic times already the home of much that is characteristic of the later Chinese tradition in the historic area.