As in the West, we find in Lung-shan much grey pottery out of which vessels for everyday use were produced.  This simple corded or matted ware seems to be in connection with Tunguse people who lived in the north-east.  The people of the Lung-shan culture lived on mounds produced by repeated building on the ruins of earlier settlements, as did the inhabitants of the “Tells” in the Near East.  They were therefore a long-settled population of agriculturists.  Their houses were of mud, and their villages were surrounded with mud walls.  There are signs that their society was stratified.  So far as is known at present, this culture was spread over the present provinces of Shantung, Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Anhui, and some specimens of its pottery went as far as Honan and Shansi, into the region of the painted pottery.  This culture lasted in the east until about 1600 B.C., with clear evidence of rather longer duration only in the south.  As black pottery of a similar character occurs also in the Near East, some authors believe that it has been introduced into the Far East by another migration (Pontic migration) following that migration which supposedly brought the painted pottery.  This theory has not been generally accepted because of the fact that typical black pottery is limited to the plains of East China; if it had been brought in from the West, we should expect to find it in considerable amounts also in West China.  Ordinary black pottery can be simply the result of a special temperature in the pottery kiln; such pottery can be found almost everywhere.  The typical thin, fine black pottery of Lung-shan, however, is in the Far East an eastern element, and migrants would have had to pass through the area of the painted pottery people without leaving many traces and without pushing their predecessors to the East.  On the basis of our present knowledge we assume that the peoples of the Lung-shan culture were probably of Tai and Yao stocks together with some Tunguses.

Recently, a culture of mound-dwellers in Eastern China has been discovered, and a southern Chinese culture of people with impressed or stamped pottery.  This latter seems to be connected with the Yueeh tribes.  As yet, no further details are known.

8 The first petty States in Shansi

At the time in which, according to archaeological research, the painted pottery flourished in West China, Chinese historical tradition has it that the semi-historical rulers, Yao and Shun, and the first official dynasty, the Hsia dynasty ruled over parts of China with a centre in southern Shansi.  While we dismiss as political myths the Confucianist stories representing Yao and Shun as models of virtuous rulers, it may be that a small state existed in south-western Shansi under a chieftain Yao, and farther to the east another small state under a chieftain Shun, and that these states warred against each other until Yao’s state was destroyed.  These first small states may have existed around 2000 B.C.