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[[underlined]] APPENDIX II. [[/underlined]] 7. years, that state, like its neighbor, Shu, ended by being swallowed up by Ch'in, toward the close of the 4th century B.C. [[underlined]] The State of Ch'u. [[/underlined]] Slightly later than Pa, and a little farther downstream again, arose the state of Ch'u 楚, destined eventually to become the largest and most powerful of all those that sprang up along the great river. There is some slight indication that the Shangs, well to the north, were invading the Yangtze valley as early as around the middle and latter half of the 2nd millennium B.C. If so, perhaps their motive was the quest for deposits of copper and tin, of such vital importance to them as a Bronze Age people; since metalliferous areas, practically non-existent in the alluvial plains of the north, were numerous in the rugged, broken, and geologically far older south. Thus the "Annals of the Bamboo Books" record that in the 21st year of Ti Kuei 帝癸, last ruler of the shadowy "Hsia Dynasty" [[superscript]](16)[[/superscript]], the Shangs were raiding Ching, "the Jungle" ([[underlined]] i.e. [[/underlined]], the region along the middle Yangtze) [[superscript]](17)[[/superscript]]. -------------------- (16) [[underlined]] Chu shu chi nien [[/underlined]], III, [[underlined]] ad fin. [[/underlined]] The year named corresponds to 1568 B.C. according to the chronology followed in the "Bamboo Books", which I consider a closer approximation to the truth than the "orthodox" one. -------------------------- (17) At the beginning of the historical period in China, the district of Ching, lying along both sides of the middle Yangtze, formed one of the famous "Nine Chou", enumerated and described in those ancient works the [[underlined]] Yü kung [[/underlined]], the [[underlined]] Chou li [[/underlined]], and the [[underlined]] Erh ya [[/underlined]]. It seems then to have been densely wooded and in part swampy, half-drowned, and subject to periodical overflow by the river. [[underlined]] Cf. [[/underlined]] pp. 352 [[underlined]] sq. [[/underlined]] of the text. ------------------------ Again, if we accept a statement in the [[underlined]] Shih ching [[/underlined]] or "Classic of Poetry" (18), the great Shang king Wu Ting (19) 武丁 undertook a successful foray against Ching and Ch'u, probably in the 13th century B.C. (20- Hundreds of years later, a town called Ch'üan 權, a little north of the middle
