CO129-538-1 Hong Kong University 31-12-1931 - 6-8-1932 — Page 88

i

The Mongolian Eye

121

My concern is with the record of such an eye-form in the remains of a Chinese culture of 3,000 years ago. The evidence is the shape of the pictograph of the eye that can be dated at the latest from about 1155 B.C. (to a few decades).

To estimate this evidence properly, a word must be said about the history of Chinese characters. In general, Chinese tradition has it that one Ts'ang Hieh (or Chich)-Cantonese Ts'ong Kit devised a scheme of writing as a substitute for the quippus or knotted cords of the primitive ages. Accounts vary as to who Ts'ang Hich was but they put him back in the first half of the third millennium B.C. This is not the place for a long historical disquisition but it may be taken as certain that all that period of Chinese History is legendary, if not made up of deliberate falsification.* The supposed literary records of the period are of later compilation and modern scholars regard these earlier sovereigns as rationalizations of tribal gods while their sons and descendants would correspond to the eponymous heroes of Greece. Certain it is that no actual writing of the Period of the Five Rulers or of the time of Yao, Shun, Yü or the Hia Dynasty is known to be extant to-day. The "Tablet of Yü" is a late and clumsy forgery. With the Shang Dynasty (1722-1122 B.C.) we come to something more real. A number of bronze vessels bearing inscriptions exist which Chinese scholars regard as of this period, but it is impossible so far to assign these to fixed dates within the period. However it is now possible to determine certain inscriptions on tortoiseshell, bone or horn from Anyang in Honan as de- finitely earlier than about 1155 B.C. These are fragments of materials used in divination; the carapace of a tortoise or a bone was made to crack by means of fire and the shape of the fissures was interpreted as the answer of the divinities consulted: on the pieces was cut a record of the consultation giving the day, question and answer of the oracle and often the name of the monarch concerned or an ancestor venerated. Fortunately the skill of Chinese scholars has deciphered a fair number of the characters and has won a great amount of information from these riddling sentences. Suspicions long lurking in the minds of many Sinologues, Chinese or European, as to the genuineness of these fragments must now be dissipated (except for objects suspicious otherwise) by the results of the excavations at Anyang in the years 1928 and 1929, published by the Academia Sinica in Preliminary Reports of the Excavations at Anyang, Parts I and II (Peiping dated 1929)."

* It is on this material that I am working.

The proof seems valid that the site on which these inscriptions have been found was the site of the royal capital of the Yin (later Shang) Dynasty, occupied from about 1400 B.C. when P'an Keng #moved there until the reign of Ti Yih (ending about 1155 B.C.) when the place was apparently destroyed by the waywardness of the Yellow River. There are some grounds for holding that some of these fragments belong to earlier monarchs as far back as 1766 B.C. and were carried about with the reigning

Cp. Marce! Granet: "Chinese Civilisation," Book II Ch. I. Preliminary Reports of Excavations at Anyang (Academia Sinica: Pekin 1929), Vol. II, p. 363 (article by Fu Ssûnien).

* I shall quote this as REAY I or II.

May 1932.

141