l recently we were dependent for the beginnings of Chinese history
on the written Chinese tradition. According to these sources China's
history began either about 4000 B.C. or about 2700 B.C. with a
succession of wise emperors who "invented" the elements of a
civilization, such as clothing, the preparation of food, marriage, and a
state system; they instructed their people in these things, and so
brought China, as early as in the third millennium B.C., to an
astonishingly high cultural level. However, all we know of the origin of
civilizations makes this of itself entirely improbable; no other
civilization in the world originated in any such way. As time went on,
Chinese historians found more and more to say about primeval times. All
these narratives were collected in the great imperial history that
appeared at the beginning of the Manchu epoch. That book was translated
into French, and all the works written in Western languages until recent
years on Chinese history and civilization have been based in the last
resort on that translation.

Modern research has not only demonstrated that all these accounts are
inventions of a much later period, but has also shown _why_ such
narratives were composed. The older historical sources make no mention
of any rulers before 2200 B.C., no mention even of their names. The
names of earlier rulers first appear in documents of about 400 B.C.; the
deeds attributed to them and the dates assigned to them often do not
appear until much later. Secondly, it was shown that the traditional
chronology is wrong and another must be adopted, reducing all the dates
for the more ancient history, before 900 B.C. Finally, all narratives
and reports from China's earliest period have been dealt a mortal blow
by modern archaeology, with the excavations of recent years. There was
no trace of any high civilization in the third millennium B.C., and,
indeed, we can only speak of a real "Chinese civilization" from 1300
B.C. onward. The peoples of the China of that time had come from the
most varied sources; from 1300 B.C. they underwent a common process of
development that welded them into a new unity. In this sense and
emphasizing the cultural aspects, we are justified in using from then on
a new name, "Chinese", for the peoples of China. Those sections,
however, of their ancestral populations who played no part in the
subsequent cultural and racial fusion, we may fairly call "non-Chinese".
This distinction an