If it had not been the Chinese of Ho Nan who first used records, it is just as probable that the tonic and monosyllabic absorption which, as things were and are, moved from north to south, might have moved from south to north. During the Chou dynasty (1122 B.C.-222 B.C.), when the extension of the Chinese race took place (which had probably already for long gone on) in the clear light of history, it will be noticed that the rulers of all the great colony nations of the south--Ts'u, Wu, and Yüeh--had, in turn, to remind the Emperor of China of their perfect equality with him in spiritual claim and ancient descent; of their connection with dynasties precedent to his; of times when his ancestor was a mere vassal like themselves. No Tartars of those times ever put forth claims like these, though, it is true, in much later times some of the (non-Turkish) Tartar rulers of North China traced their ancestors back to the mythical Chinese emperors who reigned in Shan Tung. Again, the founder of the Hia dynasty (2205 B.C.) is repeatedly said to have been buried at modern Shao-hing (between Hangchow and Ningpo), and the King of Yüeh even sacrificed to him there. So the Emperor Shun, the predecessor and patron of the same founder, was traditionally buried near Ch'ang-sha in modern Hu Nan province. The First August Emperor included both these "lions" in his pleasure tours among the great sights of China. No sound historical deduction, of course, can be drawn from these traditions, however persistent: if false, they were, at any rate, open to the criticism of a revolutionary and all-powerful Emperor over 2000 years ago, and to a second, almost equally powerful, who visited both places a century later; the suggestion inevitably follows from the existence of these traditions in the south that either the cultured Chinese whom we first find in Ho Nan had moved northwards from Hu Nan, Kiang Si, and the lake districts generally, before they spread themselves backwards; or that the uncultured Chinese had moved north before the cultured Chinese moved south; or that both north and south Chinese were at first equally cultured, until within historical times the north Chinese (i.e. in Ho Nan, along the Yellow River) so perfected their system of records that they carried all before them. After all there is no strain on the imagination in suggesting this, for early Western civilization grew up in the same way.