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inese book I Ching (Yu 1990a), which is considered as the most important source of Chinese culture. When one notices the fact that the Chinese culture has hardly ever moved too far away from the Classics, one may better understand the significance of the ecological experience in the Guanzhong Basin to Chinese culture, especially to the adaptive ways coping with the environment (Yu 1990a) . In Chinese history, "fighting for power" usually occurred on the great north China Plain, but it was surrounding areas away from the great plain that nurtured powers like the Zhou people, which then came to be displayed on the great plain (Liu 1987). Recognizing the main flow of the Chinese culture as an agricultural one, the author emphasizes that the surrounding basins which were more suitable for agriculture must be taken in special consideration. 4) "Fighting for power on the Central Plain" has led repeatedly to the formation of "no-man's land" (Jin et al 1990). To escape death the civil residents fled into the hilly area of south-east China, where a series of small basins act as natural refuges. This was especially obvious duri ng the dynasties of Eastern Jin (317-420 AD) and Southern Song (1127-1279). It made the Chinese model their ideal society on a basin, which is vividly illustrated by Tao Yuanming's "the land of peach blossoms" from the Eastern Jin Dynasty. 5) From the geographical distribution pattern of the Chinese population, one can see that the population is most densely distributed in the Sichuan Basin, Guanzhong Basin, south-east China's hilly land, etc (Wu and Zhang 1984; Jin et al 1990). This has further strengthened the basin characteristics of Chinese Culture. 6) The Theory and practice of Feng-shui, which sum up typical ways that Chinese cope with their environment, were mainly developed against the background of the hilly landscape in south-east China, and the ideal Feng-shui mode is actually an idealized basin (Yu 1990c, 1991a, 1991b). The rules of Feng-shui have made the rural landscapes so beautiful and ecologically healthful that even modern scientists can not help expressing their admiration (e.g. Feng and Wang 1989; Lip 1987; Needham 1962; Skinner 1982) . 7) Because of the backwardness of land transportation, basins that have always had a glorious agricultural civilization during the long history of water-way transportation have still kept the splendid traditional agricultural landscapes intact. However, according to modern standards of value, they are the "third world" in this country and need to be developed, and the only way for the development of these areas is eco-development. Thus, Chinese agriculture has experienced and will continue to experience a basin environment, which has always had a great influence on the evolution of ecologically prudent behavior in Chinese culture. The effects of the basin on the evolution on the prudence will be investigated as follows. BASIN EXPERIENCE FAVORS THE DEVELPMENT OF CULTURAL ECOLOGICAL PRUDENT BEHAVIOR The basin landscape with its well defined, isolated spatial characteristics well meets the conditions, i.e. resources are scare and defensible, the group as a whole benefits from prudent behavior, and the group is to be well organized and pure, which induce ecologically prudent behavior. This can be analyzed in the following aspects: 1) A basin forms a well defined and stable "eco-cultural region" (Dasmann 1985) . A moderate-sized basin will be occupied completely by a