2 replies to this topic

[kaixin]

Excuse my ignorance, but some Chinese scholar said that most southern Chinese belong to the Hemudu culture of ancient times. And he goes on to say that it is a Yue culture and that some Yue kings were found buried in the Hong Kong area.

What and who is this Hemudu civilization? Was it comparable to the Huang He River civilazations? I thought that there were Negrito and Australoid peoples in southern China at that time even before the arrival of Yue.

[Yun]

The Hemudu culture was discovered in Ningbo. Here are some sites related to it:

http://www.china.org...logy/118822.htm

http://english.peopl...0816_48318.html

http://www.mnsu.edu/...sia/hemudu.html

Regarding the claim in the last link that the Hemudu site has the earliest evidence of rice cultivation in the world, don't take it seriously. Read this thread instead:
http://www.chinahist...?showtopic=3785

[somechineseperson]

I don't think southern Chinese "belong" to the Hemudu culture. It is true that the Hemudu culture developed independently and was a contemporary of the Longshan culture in North China, but the people of Hemudu were probably not Chinese, but Austro-Asiatic speakers belonging to the Southern Mongolid group (similar to Vietnamese).

I think as China expanded politically and culturely under the Shang and Western Zhou Dynasties, the lower Yangtze region became gradually sinised and by the Spring and Autumn periods developed into two sinified states, Wu and Yue, which were absorbed into the Zhou feudal order.

So the lower Yangtze region became Chinese from the Zhou period onwards. Modern southern Chinese are either descendants of sinised natives of southern China or migrants and colonists from northern China. There were major colonisation efforts in this region from the Qin Dynasty onwards, and Chinese populations probably arrived in this area even earlier during the Shang and Zhou periods.

There wasn't any Australoid populations in archaic southern China as far as I know. The Australoid peoples were originally in oceanic south-east Asia. There were Austro-Asiatic speaking southern Mongolids in much of southern China during the Shang and Zhou periods. Then as Chinese speaking Han people (belonging to the eastern Mongolid group) gradually moved southwards in subsequent dynasties, the native Austro-Asiatic populations were either isolated into small pockets or were pushed out into oceanic south-east Asia. There the Austro-Asiatic peoples in turn "pushed out" and "isolated" the native Australoid populations in oceanic south-east Asia.

Edited by somechineseperson, 02 November 2005 - 04:30 PM.