Note 20 — Chapter XII · How Copper-culture reached China

There was good reason for the early gold rush towards the east. Gold can still be easily found “everywhere and in every form” in Siberia. The Altai means “gold mountains”, and these yield silver and copper as well as gold. Indeed, eastern Siberia is a much richer metalliferous area than western Siberia, and this fact appears to have been ascertained at a very remote period. The searchers for metals not only collected gold, copper, and silver on the Altai Mountains and the area of the upper reaches of the Yenesei River, but also penetrated into Chinese Turkestan, where, as in Russian Turkestan, trading colonies were founded, the metals were worked, and the agricultural mode of life, including the system of irrigation, adopted with undoubted success.20 Important archæological excavations, conducted by Dr. Stein in Chinese Turkestan, “on behalf of the Indian Government”, have revealed traces of the far-reaching influences exercised by Mesopotamian culture in a region now covered by the vast and confusing sand-dunes of the Taklamakan Desert. At Khotan the discoveries made were of similar character to those at Anau.