Sublime

Ch’u was not like the other states in the Central Plains. Although the rulers of Ch’u traced their ancestry to a grandson of the Yellow Emperor, the patriarch of Chinese culture, they represented its shamanistic periphery. From their ancestral home in the Sungshan area, just south of the Yellow River, they moved, or were pushed, steadily southwest,

Lewis Hyde portrays gift economies in general: “The only essential is this: the gift must always move”—that is, people must keep passing it on. To treat a gift correctly is thus to “allow [ourselves] to become a channel for its current.”34