meters (six million square miles).
             · amount to more than a billion and are the majority in the twenty-one provinces that form China proper.
             · Overseas Han Chinese consisting of large Chinese communities which have established themselves in most of the countries of South-East Asia (Indo-Chinese peninsula, Indonesia, and the Philippines), Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, etc. (See the table below).
             · Not a homogeneous whole. There is wide difference in the dialects they speak. Actually, between some dialects, there is more difference among them than some Indo-European languages, for example Spanish and Italian.
             · Why they are called dialects?
             · Chinese Romanization systems (Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Zhuyin Fuhao).
             · There is one relatively homogeneous block, the Northern dialects spoken by roughly 70% of the Han Chinese.
             2. The Han population and the area they occupy
             Han populations in East Asia outside of the People's Republic of China (1986) estimates)
             Comparative areas of some provinces with a Han majority and the countries of Europe (in square kilometers)
             Chinese provinces Area European countries
             There are fifty-five non-Han minorities in China. They enjoy a certain degree of political autonomy. The nine national minorities listed in the book (Chuang, Uighurs, I, Tibetans, Miao, Manchus, Mongols, Puyi, Koreans) mostly live outside China proper.
             Four groups of cultures can generally be identified:
             1. The sedentary peoples with a highly developed agriculture forming their predominant activity.
             Two different kinds of agriculture can be distinguished
             1. A 'dry' agriculture grows by way of cereals barley, wheat, and various different species of millet, associated with North China.
             2. The wet cultivation of rice which was not fully developed until the end of the last millennium. The
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