it seems most correct to say that the bronze was brought to the Far East
through the agency of peoples living north of China, such as the Turkish
tribes who in historical times were China's northern neighbours (or
perhaps only individual families or clans, the so-called smith families
with whom we meet later in Turkish tradition), reaching the Chinese
either through these people themselves or through the further agency of
Mongols. At first the forms of the weapons were left unaltered. The
bronze vessels, however, which made their appearance about 1450 B.C. are
entirely different from anything produced in other parts of Asia; their
ornamentation shows, on the one hand, elements of the so-called "animal
style" which is typical of the steppe people of the Ordos area and of
Central Asia. But most of the other elements, especially the "filling"
between stylized designs, is recognizably southern (probably of the Tai
culture), no doubt first applied to wooden vessels and vessels made from
gourds, and then transferred to bronze. This implies that the art of
casting bronze very soon spread from North China, where it was first
practiced by Turkish peoples, to the east and south, which quickly
developed bronze industries of their own. There are few deposits of
copper and tin in North China, while in South China both metals are
plentiful and easily extracted, so that a trade in bronze from south to
north soon set in.

The origin of the Hsia state may have been a consequence of the progress
due to bronze. The Chinese tradition speaks of the Hsia _dynasty_, but
can say scarcely anything about it. The excavations, too, yield no
clear conclusions, so that we can only say that it flourished at the
time and in the area in which the painted pottery occurred, with a
centre in south-west Shansi. We date this dynasty now somewhere between
2000 and 1600 B.C. and believe that it was an agrarian culture with
bronze weapons and pottery vessels but without the knowledge of the art