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 Yüeh 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.

On the cultural scene we first find an important element of progress:
bronze, in traces in the middle layers of the Yang-shao culture, about
1800 B.C.; that element had become very widespread by 1400 B.C. The
forms of the oldest weapons and their ornamentation show similarities
with weapons from Siberia; and both mythology and other indications
suggest that the bronze came into China from the north and was not
produced in China proper. Thus, from the present state of our knowledge,
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