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[[underlined]] Chapter XV. [[/underlined]]     324.
area, almost exclusively by sea. Wherever its strongly individualized culture may have originated---whether in Yüeh itself or in some adjacent region---traces of it persist to this day in many of the coastal and insular portions of the Far East, from Japan to Indo-China and Indonesia, and even to Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean. [[superscript]] (282) [[/superscript]] Of the latter great
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[[superscript]] (282) [[/superscript]] On the "Yüeh" t^[[y]]pe of culture and its surviving traces, see the references cited in Appendix II, note 72.
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island and of Borneo especially is this the case; for there, the recent manner of life seems, [[underlined]] mutatis mutandis, [[/underlined]] to represent the one prevalent in Yüeh before that region came under the influence of the Bronze Age civilization of northern and central China. [[superscript]] (283) [[/superscript]]
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[[superscript]] (283) [[/superscript]] This is by no means to imply that^[[|]]the tribes concerned reached either Madagascar or even Borneo directly from Yüeh. On the contrary, they seem to have come from the Indo-Chinese and Malay Peninsulas, perhaps by way of Sumatra or Java.
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    Yüeh was not absorbed into the Chinese social and political complex until toward the close of the 3rd century before our Era; and then only incompletely, as far as manners and customs were concerned.
    I also knew that the old Yüeh country had later (especially during the middle third of the 1st millennium A.D.), through oversea connections that had developed with India, become an important center of early Buddhism in China; but that this aspect of its history had been very little studied---not at all, in fact, in an archaeological sense. The great Taiping Rebellion of the middle of the 19th century had, it was true, reduced many of its temples and monasteries to ashes; but some of their sites, I thought, might well repay seeking out and excavating.

[[underlined]] Visit to Ningpo. [[/underlined]]
    The land-route from Shanghai to Shao-hsing, through Hangchow, was, I found, quite impracticable just now, as the intervening region (especial-