ARCHAEOLOGY IN HONG KONG AND SOUTH CHINA (1938)
W. SCHOFIELD*
Of all the ancient and famous seats of early civilisation, China is the one where the smallest amount of scientific investigation has hitherto been done. Years of excavation and research have revealed to us many of the details of the life and history of Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Palestine, Minoan Crete, the Hittite confederacy, and prehistoric India; but of China all that was known came partly from the chance finds of curio-hunters, about which their finders carefully suppressed all information of scientific value such as provenance, depth of burial, and context of other finds; and partly from the literature of the Chou and Han dynasties, which, valuable as it is, is a distorting medium for historians.
In the last ten years, however, scientific investigation has been started. The Chinese National Research Institute has excavated several important dwelling sites in North China, including that of the capital of the Shang dynasty. Several distinguished foreign scholars, mostly Swedes, have conducted explorations and excavations in the service of the National Government, and various provincial societies of scholars and archaeologists have worked in their own areas. A few years ago the Research Institute discovered and excavated untouched graves of the great Shang civilisation; the report on their work is eagerly awaited.
All this activity, however, relates to the area of North China traditionally known as the centre of ancient Chinese civilisation. From China south of the Yangtse and especially from its coast provinces, hardly any object had been known to come that was
* Mr. Schofield (1888-1968) was a Cadet Officer in the Hong Kong Civil Service 1911-1938. Previous contributions will be found in the 1968 and 1969 Journals, (Vols 8 and 9).
The first of these, Ch'eng-tsu-yai (*‡A), a Report of Excavations of the Proto-historic Site at Cheng-tzu-yai, Li-ch'eng Hsien, Shantung was published as Archaeologia Sinica Number One by Academica Sinica Nanking 1934. A translation into English by K. Starr has been published by the Yale University Press, Yale Publications in Anthropology, No. $2, under the title Ch'eng-tzu-yai: The Black Pottery Culture Site at Lung-shan-chen.