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HEROLD J. WIENS
Contact between the Han and non-Han resulted in the gradual acculturation of the lesser to the superior culture, and military conquest hastened the overwhelming of the lesser cultures in the kind of areas in which the Han were interested in settling, chiefly lowland valley farming regions. Into the poorer mountain lands of south China the Han found small reason at first to penetrate, and these were left to the mountain tribesmen whose ancestors occupied the land before the coming of the Han.
The history-conscious Han people left records of their contacts and conflicts with the non-Han peoples in all parts of China, so that we can find the names of some 800 ethnic groups, or, rather, 800 names of ethnic groups with whom the Han came into contact in the course of their expansion from the Yellow river heartland. Many of these names no doubt were of identical groups recorded at different times by different people. The brief notices revealing the ethnic characteristics of these groups were sufficient to allow their classification by later students into larger common tribes. An especially useful study of these groupings was made by Professor William Eberhard, presently of the University of California, Berkeley.2
Of these 300 odd ethnic groups, Professor Eberhard found that only eighty were met with in north China; 290 were found in south China and 345 were found in southwest China. The small percentage found in north China probably reflects both the topography and the climate of the north. The dry climate of the northern peripherals of China restricted livelihood and population number, whereas the grasslands and plains reduced isolated ethnic evolution and developed a greater degree of intermixture and homogeneity than in the south. Similarly, the south China hills and valleys are less isolating than the high mountains and deep gorgelands of the southwest, so that less ethnic variety is found in the south than in the southwest. Thus, cultural diversity appears to reflect the topographic character of the land.
Professor Eberhard recognized that, with the beginning of history in south and southwest China, there were four major cultural groupings in southwest China and three major and six
2 William Eberhard, Kultur und Siedlung der Randvölker China (The culture and settlement distribution of the peripheral peoples of China), T'oung Pao, Supplement to Vol. 36, Leiden, 1942.