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W. SCHOFIELD
thought to be older than the Han dynasty (210 B.C.). It was known to have been conquered by the First Emperor and added to China, but even history is silent on it prior to that time (220 B.C.). Hence its prehistory lay shrouded in almost darkness, with only a few vague traditions and scanty ethnographic and linguistic data to shed light upon it.
The first beginnings of enquiry into the pre-Chinese culture of South China date back to about 1926 when Dr. Heanley, then investigating the geology of Hong Kong as an amateur, noticed lying here and there on hills of gravelly clay formed from decayed granite, stones which could not have been formed and left there naturally, and which clearly had the shape of stone adzes, as a rule smoothed and polished. Realising the importance of these finds, he devoted much of his leisure to a careful search for more of them, and in so doing discovered a number of sites, which included an axe factory, a workshop for jewellers working in quartz and other stones, and shore settlements, presumably of fishermen, as well as hill settlements. In this work he was associated with Prof. Shellshear, of Hong Kong University, and shortly before leaving Hong Kong in 1930 he interested me in the subject. I had for some time been investigating the geology of the Colony, and started this new line in association with Dr. Heanley and Prof. Shellshear. My contribution consisted mainly in discovering new sites, chiefly in sandbanks on the coasts and islands of the New Territory. Special attention was paid to these for two reasons; first, the beaches were being vigorously dug for sand to be used in building and public works; second, these sandbanks were the only places where a succession of layers containing objects of different ages could be found. As no beds of limestone exist in the Colony, it was vain to look for caves.
In my explorations I had occasion to examine a beach site discovered by Dr. Heanley on the island of Lamma close to Hong Kong. This had been dug back a considerable distance further, and I saw, littered over the beach, vast quantities of pottery, with more projecting from the sandy cliff behind. One piece of a cup I found was covered with a bottle-green glaze, a ware which was later found to be a feature of the culture at this and several other sites in Hong Kong. Later visits to the site revealed that bronze weapons and tools were to be found in fair number; in addition, rings of