A History of China by Wolfram Eberhard
page 25 of 545 (04%)
page 25 of 545 (04%)
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The origin of rice is not yet known; according to some scholars, rice
was first cultivated in the area of present Burma and was perhaps at first a perennial plant. Apart from the typical rice which needs much water, there were also some strains of dry rice which, however, did not gain much importance. The centre of this Tai culture may have been in the present provinces of Kuangtung and Kuanghsi. Today, their descendants form the principal components of the Tai in Thailand, the Shan in Burma and the Lao in Laos. Their immigration into the areas of the Shan States of Burma and into Thailand took place only in quite recent historical periods, probably not much earlier than A.D. 1000. Finally there arose from the mixture of the Yao with the Tai culture, at a rather later time, the Yüeh culture, another early Austronesian culture, which then spread over wide regions of Indonesia, and of which the axe of rectangular section, mentioned above, became typical. Thus, to sum up, we may say that, quite roughly, in the middle of the third millennium we meet in the _north_ and west of present-day China with a number of herdsmen cultures. In the _south_ there were a number of agrarian cultures, of which the Tai was the most powerful, becoming of most importance to the later China. We must assume that these cultures were as yet undifferentiated in their social composition, that is to say that as yet there was no distinct social stratification, but at most beginnings of class-formation, especially among the nomad herdsmen. [Illustration: Map 1. Regions of the principal local cultures in prehistoric times. _Local cultures of minor importance have not been shown_.] |
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