National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

Menghin has afterwards (1931, p. 561) characterized the carriers of the Huang-
ho cultures as "Schweinezüchtern" and not as agriculturists. But everything goes to
prove that the Yang-shao people carried on agriculture side by side with pig breed-
ing, and we know that they even cultivated rice.
Through Andersson's discoveries North China has been included in the vast Euro-
Asiatic chalcolithic cultural complex characterized by painted pottery and the first
appearance of copper.
Nowhere did the art of vase painting reach such a perfection in chalcolithic time
as in the Chinese province of Kansu. The ability to work metals seems to have reach-
ed China at a somewhat later stage.
As time has passed a lot of new material has been added from many places,
above all Iran, Baluchistan, India, and apparently also from Russian Turkistan.
In the East several new sites have been explored inside the already known domain
of the N. China polychrome pottery, and also outside this region a few specimens
of painted wares have come to light, inter alia in Jehol and Inner Mongolia. The
addition in comparative material has, however, hardly simplified the question of the
connection between East and West in aeneolithic time, rather the opposite.
So many speculations and far-reaching theories have been advanced connecting
the spread from West to East of the painted pottery with the migrations of certain
peoples from SE Europe to NW China, that it is time to come down to earth again
and confess that we cannot know anything about such things. As a matter of fact
we know very little about the very material on which such hypotheses ought to be
founded, as only a part of the Chinese pottery has been made available through
publications.
Now the vase painting is a rather complicated phenomenon. It presupposes a high-
ly developed ceramic art with skilled workmen well acquainted with the fabrication
of hard-burnt wares; furthermore knowledge of the production of certain colours,
and familiarity with the brush. All these circumstances taken together constitute
such a complex phenomenon that it is very unlikely that the art of vase painting has
evolved in different centra in chalcolithic time.
If we accept the theory of the art of vase painting as an importation, both the
distribution and the nature of the earlier painted wares in China make it clear that
the way of entrance has been from the north-west, i. e. across Central Asia.¹ Un-
der such conditions the spread of the knowledge of vase painting must have passed
through certain parts of the present province of Sinkiang. The geographical
position of this province predestinates it to be an intermediary link between
West and East, even though the Pamirs seem to block the southern part
from any sort of intercourse with the countries west thereof. Especially north

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