Bulletin Winter 1975

Prof.Ping-ti Ho's Speech Longevity of Chinese Civilization The longevity of Chinese civilization is generally conceded to be something of a unique phenomenon in world history; as such it has evoked explanations ranging from the plausible to the esoteric. An intellectually more acceptable interpretation is now possible, thanks to the availability of massive archaeological and scientific data pouring out of China since 1949. By making a preliminary integration of such new data with archaic Chinese literary records I have uncovered two basic factors that may provide a fresh interpretation as to why the Chinese civilization is the only major civilization of ancient origin that is still distinctive and vital today. Self-sustaining Agriculture First, there is China's self-sustaining agriculture. Combined archaeological and scientific evidence indicates that a self-sustaining agricultural system made its debut in the Yang-shao nuclear area around 5000 B.C. The Yang-shao nuclear area embraced the southeastern portion of the loess highlands, that is, the Wei River basin in Shensi, southern Shan- si, and western Honan. This self- sustaining agriculture was an outcome of the response of the Yang-shao proto-Chinese to a natural environment which was in some ways restrictive but in one peculiar way uniquely favorable. The environment was restrictive in terms of extremities of climate, light rainfall, relative scarcity of plant resources, and rather dissected landforms. The one most important endowment of this area, which on balance more than offsets its natural disadvantages, is the loess. With a rare sense of history among pioneering investigators of the loess, Raphael Pumpelly, an American geologist who led an archaeological expedition to Russian Turkestan in 1904, pointed out the important role played by the loess in the history of man, with special reference to the loess in China: “Its fertility seems inexhaustible, a quality it owes partly, as (Ferdinand von) Richthofen remarks, to its depth and texture, partly to the salts brought to the surface after rain by capillary attraction acting through tubular channels left after the decay of successive generations of the grass stems inclosed during its accumulation, and partly to the increment of fresh dust that is still brought by winds from the interior. Its self-fertilizing ability is shown by the fact that crops have been raised continuously, through several thousand years, on its immense areas in China, and practically without fertilizing additions. It is on these lands that dense populations accumulate and grow up to the limit of its great life-supporting capacity. *" Since the slash-and-burn system of the tropics is dictated primarily by the inability of the soil to restore its fertility without long fallow, and since the loess of China is famous for its self-fertilizing capacity, it is fairly obvious from the standpoint of agronomy that the Yang-shao agricultural system was not slash-and-burn in the conventional sense and may be regarded as self-sustaining from its very inception. As a precaution against any possibly naive correlating of a few scientific facts for a conjectural reconstruction of Yang-shao agricultural practices, I asked Dr. Jack R. Harlan of the University of Illinois at Ur bana, a leading authority on the history of crops in general and on the origins of wheat and barley in particular, without first telling him anything about the fallow system recorded in Chou literature, what he would think, in the perspective of agronomy and comparative primitive agriculture, to have been the Yang-shao practices. He said without hesitation that the Yang-shao practices would be different from those of the slash-and-burn system, which would require at least eight times as much land as was actually cultivated each year to make a long fallow feasible ； that Yang-shao farmers would probably need no more than three times as much land as was actually cultivated each year; 5