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[[underlined]] Chapter XVII. [[/underlined]]  363.

sive excavation and archaeological research later on.
  For about 100 miles/ [[insertion]] north [[/insertion]] from T'ai-yüan we found the country fairly open and closely cultivated. The landscape was dotted with countless mounds, apparently sepulchral in character and often arranged in groups of cemeteries. In one instance the newly constructed motor-road passed directly through a mound, which it thus divided into two roughly equal halves right down to the undisturbed soil. In the two vertical sections thus exposed, however, we could see nothing in the way of a burial vault or funeral chamber. The latter must therefore not have lain directly beneath the apex of the mound, in a central position, but at some distance to one side of it. I have noticed the same circumstance elsewhere---that in ancient Chinese grave-mounds, as for instance at that of Ho Ch'ü-ping (described in Chapter VII), the actual interment was at a considerable distance; although commonly I have found it within the tumulus itself. 
     The basin of the Fên River, the spacious T'ai-yüan plain, is bounded on the north by a range of mountains which extend roughly southwest-by-northeast, culminating in the latter direction in the famous sacred mountain [[underlined]] massif [[/underlined]] of the Wu T'ai Shan 五臺山. This range has in all ages formed an important political boundary (in earlier times an ethnic one also), easily defended but hard to penetrate and practically impossible to turn. It was not, indeed, until well within the full historical period, during the 1st millennium B.C., that the Chinese Bronze Age civilization, expanding northward, was able to overcome the resistance of the Ti tribes to the north of these mountains (see on this pp. 222 [[underlined]] sqq. [[/underlined]]).
   Northern Shansi, on the other hand, with the Ta T'ung region as its effective center, forms a separate basin, the nucleus and cradle of the ancient state of Chao and, centuries later, of the North Wei empire (on