(d) In the west, in the present provinces of Szechwan and in all the mountain regions of the provinces of Kansu and Shensi, lived the ancestors of the Tibetan peoples as another separate culture.  They were shepherds, generally wandering with their flocks of sheep and goats on the mountain heights.

(e) In the south we meet with four further cultures.  One is very primitive, the Liao culture, the peoples of which are the Austroasiatics already mentioned.  These are peoples who never developed beyond the stage of primitive hunters, some of whom were not even acquainted with the bow and arrow.  Farther east is the Yao culture, an early Austronesian culture, the people of which also lived in the mountains, some as collectors and hunters, some going over to a simple type of agriculture (denshiring).  They mingled later with the last great culture of the south, the Tai culture, distinguished by agriculture.  The people lived in the valleys and mainly cultivated rice.

The origin of rice is not yet known; according to some scholars, rice was first cultivated in the area of present Burma and was perhaps at first a perennial plant.  Apart from the typical rice which needs much water, there were also some strains of dry rice which, however, did not gain much importance.  The centre of this Tai culture may have been in the present provinces of Kuangtung and Kuanghsi.  Today, their descendants form the principal components of the Tai in Thailand, the Shan in Burma and the Lao in Laos.  Their immigration into the areas of the Shan States of Burma and into Thailand took place only in quite recent historical periods, probably not much earlier than A.D. 1000.

Finally there arose from the mixture of the Yao with the Tai culture, at a rather later time, the Yueeh culture, another early Austronesian culture, which then spread over wide regions of Indonesia, and of which the axe of rectangular section, mentioned above, became typical.

Thus, to sum up, we may say that, quite roughly, in the middle of the third millennium we meet in the north and west of present-day China with a number of herdsmen cultures.  In the south there were a number of agrarian cultures, of which the Tai was the most powerful, becoming of most importance to the later China.  We must assume that these cultures were as yet undifferentiated in their social composition, that is to say that as yet there was no distinct social stratification, but at most beginnings of class-formation, especially among the nomad herdsmen.

6 The Yang-shao culture