ABSTRACT
From the most remote past which documents allow us to picture, the inhabitants of old China have lived collected together in fairly powerful groups. It is probable that the density of these groups increased in proportion as the area of the soil under cultivation spread by means of deforestation, clearing and drainage. Local cataclysms (floods, invasions by nomads) may here and there have retarded this progress : we have no means of tracing its curve. As a matter of fact, the existence of rural communities formed simply by the union of two territorial groups can be detected only by the help of the family nomenclature and of the traces which dualism has left in the customs of law and religion. We may suppose that from the dawn of historic times, the territorial groups were of a relatively complex nature : more than two exogamous and compact groups entered into their composition. In the villages themselves, as at the present day, would be found on the one hand those who bore the same name or at least who did not intermarry, and on the other those who belonged to distinct families. In either case the documents invariably reveal a China of the towns, side by side with a China of the villages.
