Free The Gold of the Gods by Erich von Däniken Page A

the anthropologists, this Sinanthropus Pekinensis, Peking Man, is similar to
homo Heidelbergensis
, but in any case resembles the Chinese race, as it exists today in 800,000,000 examples. Peking Man is supposed to come from the Middle Pleistocene, i.e. to be about 400,000 years old. After that there is really no more prehistory.”
    The Director explained that there was no further evidence of Neolithic cultures in North China until the third millennium B.C. when the Yang-Shao culture on the Huang Ho produced painted ribbon pottery. About the second millennium B.C. came the Ma-Shang culture, the black pottery culture and the stone and copper culture of Sheng Tse Ai of Shantung, followed by the luxuriant decoration which came in with the beginning of the Bronze Age with the
t’ao t’ieh
, or monster mask, and Li Wen with its broken right-angled representations of thunder. From the fifteenth to the eleventh centuries there was a highly developed script with more than 2,000 pictographic and symbolic characters which were used for oracular inscriptions. In all periods, it was the task of Chinese rulers, the “Sons of Heaven,” to see that the course of nature unfolded in an orderly manner.
    “As far as I know, for I am not a prehistorian, there is nothing in the Middle Kingdom to lend wings to your special fantasy, no stone axes, no primitive tools, not even traces of cave paintings. And the oldest inscribed bones were dated to 3000 B.C.”
    “What was on the bones?”
    “So far it has proved impossible to decipher the inscriptions.”
    “Isn’t there anything else?”
    “A single vase that was excavated at An-yang near Honan. It was dated to 2800 B.C.”
    “Excuse me, Mr. Chian, but surely China must have some evidence of its prehistory. There must be something to show the development from the prehistorical to the historical period. Are there no mysterious ruins, no crumbled cyclopean walls?”
    “Our Chinese history can be traced back without a gap to the Emperor Huang Ti and he lived in 2698 B.C. It is a known fact that the compass existed as early as that. Therefore time cannot have begun with Huang Ti! But what happened before him, my dear friend, lies in the stars.”
    “What do you mean, in the stars?”
    Was there a tidbit left for me in this conversation after all? There was. Mr. Chiang smiled:
    “From the very earliest times the dragon has always been the Chinese symbol of divinity, inaccessibility and invincibility. P’an Ku is the legendary name of the constructor of the Chinese universe. He created the earth out of granite blocks which he caused to fly down out of the cosmos. He divided up the waters and made a gigantic .hole in the sky. He divided the sky into the eastern and western hemispheres.”
    “Might he have been a heavenly regent, who appeared in the firmament in a spaceship?”
    “No, my friend, the legend says nothing about spaceships, it only mentions dragons, but it describes P’an Ku as he who mastered chaos in the universe. He created the Yin Yang, the conception of the dual forces in nature. Yang stands for male power and the heavens, Yin for female beauty and the earth. Everything that happens in the cosmos or on earth is subordinate to one of these two symbols, which have penetrated deeply into Chinese cosmological philosophy.”
    According to legend, every ruler and “Son of Heaven” is supposed to have lived for 18,000 terrestrial years and if we take this estimate at its face value, P’an Ku brought order into the heavens 2,229,000 years ago! Perhaps these astronomical calculations may be a few years out here and there, but what does it matter with such a family tree?
    P’an Ku, whose legend is said to have spread throughout China, was depicted differently in different regions, which is not surprising in view of the vast size of this country with its surface area of 3,800,000 square miles. Sometimes he is a being with two horns on his head and a hammer in his right hand,