Overview

Zhoushan Archipelago, or Zhoushan Islands, is a large group of islands located at the mouth of Hangzhou Bay in the East China Sea where the latter meets the Yellow Sea. Put slightly differently, the Zhoushan island complex lies just beyond the mouth of the Yangtze River, where the Yangtze empties into the Pacific Ocean (or the East China Sea, as it is called locally). Known as "Chushan" by foreign powers during the Colonial Era in China (viz., the Unequal Treaties (1842-1933) period, when trade and territorial concessions were forced upon the then Qing (CE 1644-1911) Dynasty government), the city that bears the same name as the archipelago - and the name of the archipelago's main island - is the only prefecture-level political entity in China that consists solely of islands.

Neolithic Age humans belonging to the Hemudu Culture (BCE 5000-4500) inhabited the islands of the Zhoushan Archipelago. Since these islands were relatively close to the mainland, early humans eventually found a way to get from the mainland to the archipelago, and given the close proximity of the island complex, it can be assumed that there was a certain amount of traffic between the mainland and the archipelago, though just how much of such traffic there was during the Neolithic Age is not well established.

Since there are no spectacular Neolithic Age archeological-anthropological finds on the archipelago, this might suggest that the island complex was characterized by a relatively isolated culture, where the "technological" discoveries of the day were imported from the mainland with a lag, and where the islanders did not themselves contribute much of significane to the progress of these "technological" discoveries, simply because there were too few members of the communities - themselves semi-isolated, each on their respective island - to provide a "brainstorming" effect, as in "many heads think better than only one", though this is pure conjecture on my part. What the archipelago may lack in the way of an interesting prehistory, it more than makes up for in its interesting history, as the next section illustrates.