people remains undetermined. We do not know who they were nor whence
they came. Such evidence as there is points to their immigration
from elsewhere; the Chinese themselves have a tradition of a Western
origin. The first picture we have of their actual history shows us, not
a people behaving as if long settled in a land which was their home and
that of their forefathers, but an alien race fighting with wild beasts,
clearing dense forests, and driving back the aboriginal inhabitants.

Setting aside several theories (including the one that the Chinese
are autochthonous and their civilization indigenous) now regarded
by the best authorities as untenable, the researches of sinologists
seem to indicate an origin (1) in early Akkadia; or (2) in Khotan,
the Tarim valley (generally what is now known as Eastern Turkestan),
or the K'un-lun Mountains (concerning which more presently). The
second hypothesis may relate only to a sojourn of longer or shorter
duration on the way from Akkadia to the ultimate settlement in China,
especially since the Khotan civilization has been shown to have
been imported from the Punjab in the third century B.C. The fact
that serious mistakes have been made regarding the identifications
of early Chinese rulers with Babylonian kings, and of the Chinese
_po-hsing_ (Cantonese _bak-sing_) 'people' with the Bak Sing or Bak
tribes, does not exclude the possibility of an Akkadian origin. But
in either case the immigration into China was probably gradual, and
may have taken the route from Western or Central Asia direct to the
banks of the Yellow River, or may possibly have followed that to the
south-east through Burma and then to the north-east through what is
now China--the settlement of the latter country having thus spread
from south-west to north-east, or in a north-easterly direction along
the Yangtzu River, and so north, instead of, as is generally supposed,
from north to south.