Basuria as the Origin of Far East Civilizations
Basuria is a geopolitical term coined by Basurian American historian Liu Zhongjing to denote the relatively self-sustaining civilization and peopling of the regions of Sichuan and Chongqing, as well as parts of northwestern Guizhou (Zunyi) and southern Shaanxi (Hanzhong and Ankang). Its exile government is a registered NGO in the U.S. and Japan and has lately attracted Basurian intellectuals and warriors varyingly subscribing to Liu’s studies.
Liu has in various places in his series lecture on the History of Basuria pictured a very interesting and inspiring, albeit seemingly heretical, view on the prehistorical origin of the Basurian population. The main take-home message is that Basurians are Sino-Tibetan language speakers who inherited the advanced technology, such as millet cultivation, pottery, metallurgy, from Inner Asia and, further back, indirectly from Mesopotamian early civilizations. The main route of cultural transmission of advanced technology is importing Inner Asian outputs through the northern ranges of Himalayan plateau and slowly to the northeastern range of Himalayan plateau. The vertical ranges of eastern Himalayan plateau seated at today’s western and northwestern Sichuan provided very traversable and secure valleys for human settlement. There, the Sino-Tibetan original bearers met Daic and Hmong-Khmer inhabitants who at the time may have developed highly advanced domestic techs and products such as bamboo-legged high-rise houses. However, the Hmong-Khmer inhabitants may have lagged behind Sino-Tibetan forebears in terms of stone-making technology such as those used in making the important Acheulean axes found in Piluo, Sichuan circa 120,000 BC. Therefore, they likely had been massively subjugated by the Sino-Tibetan forebears that appeared in western Sichuan highlands and valleys.
That was the basic theory of the early Basurian history by Liu. Sounding odd to ordinary people who are heavily influenced by China’s propaganda of “one-nation multiple origins; multiple origins merged into the central plain”, this alternative historical view has surprisingly large and dominant amount of empirical support from archaeology, genetics, and comparative historical linguistics. I will summarize several strains of findings in this memo for the future use for Basurian patriots.
About the Highlands and Valleys
Contrary to popular imagination, plains and lowland estuaries are not suitable habitats for human until a much later time when large-scale water management and sanitation infrastructure had matured. In James Scott’s (2017) Against the Grain, he laid out the argument and cited earlier studies to show that the favorable habits for early agricultural settlement are highland with low humidity and sufficient sun exposure. Both loess plateau (wind deposited) and alluvial soils (flood deposited) were the best candidate for neolithic agricultural expansion. The earliest Egypt neolithic civilization and early capitals were found in Upper Egypt (Thebes) or Lower Egypt (Memphis), but not in the lowland estuaries of the Nile. Early human traces were found in the more arid Eastern Africa highlands which later developed into the ancient civilizations of Ethiopia, Nubia, and Egypt, but not in the Congo River or Niger River system whose lowlands could host even greater quantities of nutrients and biomes. This is simple to understand because 1, lowland river-rich basins are also rich in disease vectors; 2, competition against other predatory animals is fierce with the diverse biome, and huminid, like other apes, were likely a prey until they have mastered Stonecraft and fire-making in the Mesolithic Age. To systematically expand against predators, which had been documented in early inscriptions and hieroglyphs to hunt humans, huminid would at least need to acquire the use of sharpened weapons in the Bronze Age; 3, The management of water and flood was not possible until state-making institutions took off in the early Bronze Age. In the case of East Asia, virtually all early civilizations were found in plateau highlands, except for the maritime Liangzhu civilization, which now prove to be the forebear of the Yuet-Austronesian cultures and peoples according to both archaeology and genetic linkages (Li et al, 2007; Buckley, 2017).
Not only are highlands suitable platform for the development of early human settlement and civilization, when combined with valleys, they altogether became almost the best platform for resource and reproduction. Early humans utilized caves for security, air conditioning, and storage, and we found prehistorical carving and pictures mostly in caves (enclosed rock walls) or on open mountain walls. The altitude contrast found in highlands with valleys provide an astronomical range of vegetations and fauna. With rapidly changing climate and a diverse nutrients and materials, valleys and highlands offer almost all you need to survive and thrive as a prehistorical hominid: shelter, storage, air-conditioning, food, defense and evasion. Folklores and proverbs in China still adhere to the term “run into mountains” to describe the first reaction when faced with enemies or danger. This vein of research is consistent with the works by environmental anthropologists John Fleagle and Stanley Ambrose, who suggest that eastern African highlands and valleys provided the refugia shelter for the very first humans. Also, James Blinkorn and the team (2022) reviewed the evidence for the Rift Valleys of eastern Africa as the refugia of early human. Overall, the tectonic pressure arising out of the colliding Indian subcontinent and the Eurasian plates have created the Himalayan plateau and the range mountains known as Hengduan Mountains. The geological characteristics and biosphere of this region (western Basuria) is very similar to the Rift Valley, featuring rapidly changing altitudes and diverse biome, rich river system between mountain ranges, traversable traces along the valleys, etc. Here is what Wikipedia said of the mountain ranges regarding the ecosystem therein:
The Hengduan Mountains support a range of habitats, from subtropical to temperate to montane biomes. The mountains are largely covered by subalpine coniferous forests.[4][5] Elevations range from 1,300 to 6,000 metres (4,300 to 19,700 ft). The dense, pristine forests, the relative isolation, and the fact that most of the area remained free from glaciation during the ice ages provides a very complex habitat with a high degree of biological diversity.
Basically, the physical, biological and geological environment of eastern Himalayan plateau made a great candidate of Basuria as the likely origin homeland of Sino-Tibetan groups because it could afford a further advanced civilization than the fluvial basin in China proper (the central plain) or the semi-arid Loess plateau. Later migration of the proto-Sino-Tibetan people out of Basuria into the Loess plateau in Shaanxi and Shanxi of China was likely not a choice of attraction (the pull factor) but due to a population explosion and the Malthusian disasters following the explosion in Basuria, as the similar out-of-Basuria movement was also directed southwest-bound towards northeastern India and the southside of the Himalayan mountains (van Driem 1999).
Genetics
The (un)suprising finding that eastern Himalayan ranges (western Basuria) bore the birthplace of Proto-Sino-Tibetan peopling contradicts the nationalist propaganda narrative of China (taught in both P.R. China and Taiwan), but its perfect geographical argument is met with genetic evidence.
E.O. Wilson’s island biogeography indicates that diversity S=C*A^z, where C is the size of island, A is the rate of immigration, and z is the rate of extinction of original residents. There is a direct linear relationship between the relative areal isolation and species diversity. Although biogeography cannot directly explain human demography as cultural and technological factors shape how people move and how successful when they do. Nevertheless, early hominids succumb to far more deterministic geographical and environmental factors that similarly determine the movement pattern and biodiversity of animals. Human genetic diversity tends to be lower with higher areal isolation, such as the harsh paths south of Himalaya and in the forest of Burma. In contrast, genetics diversity will much elevated in larger plains without natural defenses and shelters such as China. When the original proto-Sino-Tibetans emigrated to southern Himalayan ranges, they will easily oust the indigenous inhabitants and became the dominant genetic contributors in these biogeographical “islands”, but their genetic contribution would be limited and get increasingly diluted by the high rate of immigration (A) induced by the large areal connectivity (C) in China throughout the history.
The island biogeography has strong evidence. The dominant Y-chromosome haplogroup O-M117 among Sino-Tibetans is concentrated in southern Himalayan range and the forests of Manipur and Mizoram. The father clade of O-M117, i.e. O-M134, is found among 86% of Tamang, over 85% of Sino-Tibetan groups in northeast India including Adi, Naga, Nishi, Apatani (Gayden et al 2007). It is found among 34% of Bai, 34% of Tibetan, 17.4% of Mosuo (Song Mengyuan et al, 2022). Wang Ling-xiang et al (2018) concluded that O-M117 and its mutation F8 is the predominant Y-chromosome in the paternal genetic pool of Tibeto-Burmo speakers. Similar findings about the high concentration of O-134 and its various mutations in Bai, Kachin (Jingpo), Nuosu (Yi), Mosuo, Sherpa, Tibetan, and Qiang were documented by (Wen Bo et al, 2004; Guo et al 2019; Xu Bingying et al 2019; Bhandari et al, 2015). Accordingly, as a direct corroboration of the hypothesis of Sino-Tibetan peoples originating from western Basuria, Kang Longli and the team (2012) went ahead to suggest that:
In fact, O3-M117 is the only O3 sub-haplogroup appearing in certain Sino-Tibetan populations from the border of Yunnan and Tibet…A potential place for the origin of all Sino-Tibetan populations is the region east of Tibet, as we found the highest STR diversity of O3-M117 in the Qiang population from this area.
Similarly, Song Mengyuan (2022) claimed:
Our results indicated that 1) the highest genetic diversity was observed in the Qiang ethnic group compared to any of the former studied Chinese population, suggesting that the Qiang might be an older paternal branch.
On contrary, China proper is unlikely a place of origin of the Sino-Tibetan peoples. The defining O-M117 haplogroup is found in only 9.6–16% of modern Han (Bhandari et al 2015). Only 4.7% of Yunnan Han and 4.3% of Xinjiang Han carry O-M117 haplogroup (Song et al, 2022). This low level of existence is comparable to that among Vietnamese — a group barely related to the Sino-Tibetan (5%, Huang Xiufeng et al 2018). A larger study by Ning et al (2016) found 11% of Han Chinese has O-M117. Shi Hong and colleagues from China Academy of Science (Kunming) collected genetic data from 40 populations in East Asia and mapped the distribution of superclade O-M122 (including its subclade M134 and the equivalent mutation M117). The results again pointed to a conclusion that haplogroup O-M122 originated in the south of East Asia about 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. Although O-M122 is a much larger genetic branch, pinpointing it in the south only excludes the possibility that China proper is the center of East Asian civilizations.
Congruent with the historical comparative linguistic evidence that I will soon enlist, genetic findings in various Sino-Tibetan groups point to the conclusion that Basuria, at least the western Himalayan side of Basuria, formed the origin homeland of all Sino-Tibetan speaking groups, whereas China proper was likely inhabited by various East Asian genetic groups that first took the maritime route to have colonized eastern China since the out-of-Africa movement. Basurian people moved north-bound into Shaanxi and Shanxi during the Neolithic Age and developed Yangshao Civilization with their existing advanced neolithic age technology. Basurian forefathers then conquered Chinese through several waves of intrusions and left their genetic footprint of O-M117. Yangshao Civilization is the first wave of major Basurian incursion into China, the Zhou dynasty (founded by the Tibetan-Burmo-speaking “Qiang” tribes) was the second major wave.
Languages
The linguistic evidence for Basuria, rather than China, as the cradle of East Asian civilizations is a ripening field waiting for harvest. Generations of linguists (Shafer, Benedict, Karlgren, Matisoff, van Driem, to name just a few) have studied the development and Stammbaum of Sino-Tibetan languages. For starters, the very name of Sino-Tibetan language family is problematic as it inherits the orientalist legacy since of colonial time when orientalist scholars attempt to lump Indo-Chinese languages together to highlight their backward nature and contrast it with the more grammatically and syntactically sophisticated Indo-European languages (van Driem 2003). At least, Sinitic languages do not deserve a standalone large branch when all the rest distinctive languages are thrown into the hodgepodge of Tibetan-Burmese. There are little further divisions down the line of Sinitic, but each of the Tibetan-Burmese branches is vastly different from others. Through the works of Paul K. Benedict (1972) and James Matisoff (2003), we now have a much clearer understanding of what did the proto-Sino-Tibetan sound like. The reconstruction is less than complete but already has shed light on the relationship between archaic Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages.
In regard to the role of Basuria as the linguistic harbinger of Far East civilizations, century-long research of comparative linguistics strongly indicates that Basuria is the homeland of the earliest proto-Sino-Tibetan speakers. Some of these proto-Sino-Tibetans emigrated towards Yellow River and established Yangshao Civilization. Later on, another wave from the eastern ranges of Himalaya (i.e. western Basuria and southern Gansu) joined the first wave to form the Zhou tribe that later conquered Shang people in China.
Now we know that archaic Chinese with the earliest records of reliable pronunciations came from the Zhou period. The Shang bone inscriptions have left no reliable and clear patterns of pronunciations and their sizes fell far behind the bronze inscriptions of Zhou. We also know through Zheng-Zhang Shangfang, Sagart, and Matisoff’s various restoration efforts that archaic Chinese resemble Old Tibetan in being a more agglutinative language with complex consonant clusters. If anything, archaic Chinese was not an isolating monosyllabic language that represented the middle Chinese since the Han dynasty. A short play of the reconstructed archaic Chinese in this video will alienate any speakers of any modern Chinese dialects. In phonology, morphology, and lesser extent syntax, archaic Chinese is a closer relative of written Tibetan and perhaps also Qiangic languages, rather than middle Chinese. The mysterious disappearance of initial sound clusters, verbal agreement, the lack of corresponding tone change rules between middle Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages, when considered in tandem with the fact that middle Chinese phonology and its isolating tendency actually resembled Hmong-Khmer and Austronesian languages, all of these led Benedict to postulate that Sino-Tibetan is only a language spoken by elite Zhou intruders but not among the Chinese who occupied central plain:
It might be argued that the ST elements constitute only a superstratum in Chinese, and that the substratum is of distinct origin. In historical terms, the Chou people might be regarded as the bearers of a ST language, which became fused with, or perhaps immersed in, a non-ST language spoken by the Shang people (Benedict, 1972:197).
After all, Fu Sinian and Chinese scholars have long suspected that Shang people were eastern barbarians (Dongyi). The kings of Shang were shamanic religious leaders who practiced human sacrifice during trance dance and consumed human blood and flesh. Shang is suspected to be an offshoot of the Dawenkou/Longshan civilization continuum, and we also know Longshan artifacts can be found through Korean peninsular and Manchuria. Thus, Shang people may well speak a Tungustic or Koreanic language and incaved their religious rituals and commands on bone inscriptions that carried little to null information about the phonetics. As a result, scholars now suggest that modern Chinese is indeed a creoloid language once used as lingua franca among Hmong-Khmer, Austronesian, Austroasiatic people (DeLancey, 2013; van Driem, 2022). Instead, archaic Chinese spoken by Zhou people is an offshoot of the proto-Sino-Tibetan language sprang out from Basuria.
Fu Sinian and Lû Simian, among others, proposed that the Zhou people intermarried with Qiang tribes. This now seems correct but further evidence suggest Zhou people are just Qiang themselves. Historically, Shi Ji recorded that the ancestors of Zhou (古公亶父) escaped from Yong into “Di” (northwestern barbarian) territory in evasion of the Rong (another barbarian). They brought in and married “姜媛” (original female Jiang). But the character Jiang (姜) is just the same with Qiang (羌）, and their archaic Chinese sounds are identical too “klaŋ”. Pulleyblank (2000) found that “Jiang”, in spite of its radical of “female”, bore no implication to restrict its use to females only because this female radical was also used to denote “surnames” as in 姬, 嬴, 姓. In addition, it’s well known that 羌 appeared frequently in Shang bone inscriptions to describe barbarians, who were often captured and enslaved to become human sacrifice and even food for the Shang court. However, descriptions of 羌 were vastly lacking during the Zhou era. One popular explanation now received acceptance is that the founders of Zhou dynasty are 羌 barbarians themselves.
Other than historical records and the identity between Chinese characters, it is also possible that the surname of Zhou rulers Ji-“姬” is a variant of Jiang, but due to the strict exogamous moitie practices, they retain certain differences despite a common origin as being Qiangic “barbarians”. The archaic Chinese pronunciation of Ji is klɯ. Compare now this to klaŋ (羌). This may corresponds to the sound variation change in proto-Sino-Tibetan: when suffix -n is added to a word, it has the collectiving function to mean plural and multitude (Matisoff, 2003: 448). For example, *ŋa鹅 became *ŋan雁, *kwey狗 became *kweyn犬. However, the final velar stop is ŋ, not n, and we have only very vague idea of what function did a suffix velar ŋ serve in proto-Sino-Tibetan. We do have evidence that (Matisoff, 2003:522), in proto-Sino-Tibetan, nasal -k may change into velar -ŋ, as in *s-mak墨 and *s-maŋ盲, *glak雒 and *glaŋ鹰, but linguists are more agnostic about their function.
In addition, Liu Zhongjing has postulated another theory that 成-*deŋ as in Chengdu (the capital of basin Basuria), 氐-*til as a Qiangic Basurian all refer to the same meaning as “highland”. I personally found evidence for this theory from the reconstructed proto-Sino-Tibetan. If confirmed, would prove that 氐=羌=成=姬=姜, all are different forms of the same meaning as “highland” or “highlanders”. See: 1) 成-*deŋ, a variant of the root for mountain in proto-Sino-Tibetan *m/r-duŋ, a modern Mandarin version of this root etyma is 冢(zhong, *ti̯wong); 2) 羌/姜（？姬-ng） in archaic Chinese is *klaŋ, this is perhaps a cognate with another proto root *klaaŋ, which means mountain in Tibetan-Burmo speakers of northeastern India, such as Kuki and Chin. The Chinese variant derived from this root is 京-*kli̯ɑ̆ng, denoting both capital and mountain. 3) if the hypothesized velar final suffix -ŋ above does exist, adding -ŋ to *til-氐 derives sound variation of *tieŋ and the palatal *l merged with velar -ŋ. Then, 氐 is just another form of 成-*deŋ, which itself is a variant of the proto-Sino-Tibetan root m/r-duŋ. Thus, 氐=羌=成=姬=姜, all refer to mountain/hill/capital.
The bottom line is that comparative historical linguistics show that the Zhou people are a Sino-Tibetan speaking population that conquered China together with its proto-Sino-Tibetan allies from the northwest. It is more robust and accurate to consider Zhou people as an offshoot of the out-of-Basurian movement who first settled on the Loess plateau of Yellow River. Their metallurgical technology far surpassed that of Shang, for whom bronze was sporadically used mostly for religious purposes and whose writings are only found on animal bones. This aligns well with Liu Zhongjing’s claim that Basurians learned the advanced technology from Inner Asia (where bronze age occurred several thousand years ahead of China) and used it to successfully conquer the Chinese people living in the central plain. This is the second wave of Basurian conquest of China. The first was the establishment of the neolithic Yangshao Civilization.
The language spoken by Basurians living in the basin and cities is Chinese Mandarin (southwestern dialect), but Basurians living in highlands and valleys are various groups of Tibetan, Nuosu, Nisu, Qiang, and Tujia, whose languages still preserve the ancient traits of proto-Sino-Tibetan. Basuria had continued to be the spring of Sino-Tibetan tongues to the rest of East Asia. One example showing that Basurian retained proto-Sino-Tibetan pronunciations, even thousand years later since the Zhou/Qiangic conquest of China, while the Chinese creole spoken during Zhou sovereign had lost the original pronunciations. In a comment to Erya-尔雅, it was written “蜀人呼笔为不律也”. The comment was added by Guo Pu in Eastern Jin Dynasty around 300 AD and it means “Shu people (Basurians) call pen as *pu-ljeut”. The etyma in proto-Sino-Tibetan for pen as a writing device is exactly “brəy”, evolved to be “bri” in written Tibetan, “brui” in Tsangla, “brjar” in Tangut, “re” in Burmese, and “bi” in Mandarin. Basurian, at least during the 3rd century AD still preserved the proto-Sino-Tibetan word system when Chinese had lost it due to intensive creolization.
Apart from linguistic evidence, the earliest paleolithic relics have been recently found in western Sichuan and named Piluo Civilization, further corroborating van Driem’s claim that western Sichuan (Basuria) hosted the earliest Sino-Tibetan speakers. Piluo Civilization is believed to be a 25,000 old paleolithic culture with finest and oldest stone axes ever found in East Asia. If proven, Basuria would almost definitely be the only possible homeland of descendant civilizations in East Asia.
