Many eons ago, long before the consolidation of the modern nation-state we call China, the southeastern quadrant of the Eurasian landmass that is China today was a complex world composed of myriad cultures of diverse origins. In the northern reaches of this region, across the vast alluvial plain formed by the eons of flooding by the Yellow River, known in Chinese texts as the Central Plain and to geographers as the North China Plain, a cluster of localized cultures had formed by the fourth to third millennia BCE. These cultures were complex and technologically sophisticated. By the early to middle second millennium a written language had evolved that enabled a narrow stratum of literate elites to share ideas and to nurture the development of a classical culture that is identified with figures such as Confucius. This culture was widely shared across the divergent cultures of the Plain, providing thereby a common bond. This is the nascent civilization that in this book we shall call Sinitic, so as not to confuse it with Chinese, which, as we shall argue, only emerged many centuries later. Concurrently, in the vast regions that lay south of the Plain and the Yellow River basin, an array of importantly and pronouncedly distinct but equally complex cultures had formed in the basin of the Yangtze River and its tributaries and along the coast south of the river's mouth. Traditionally, History has not recognized the contributions of these cultures to Chinese civilization. That is in part what this book intends to address.

Through the second millennium BCE the cultures of the Central Plain, one of the largest alluvial plains in the world, began to consolidate into a loosely homogenized whole in an era that historians know as the Shang, or Yin, dynasty. Regional differences across the Plain remained, but enough was shared that historians can realistically refer to this as the root from which Sinitic and then mature Chinese culture emerged. This consolidation, however, was limited to the Plain and the Yellow River drainage basin, including some tributary basins to the west. Even as patterns of interaction developed, especially along the lines of encounter, the cultures of the Yangtze basin and the adjacent coast largely remained both diverse and distinct.