North China () is a geographical region of the People's Republic of China, consisting of five provincial-level administrative divisions, namely the direct-administered municipalities Beijing and Tianjin, the provinces Hebei and Shanxi, and the autonomous region Inner Mongolia (although the four prefectures east of the Greater Khingan Range are sometimes regarded as parts of Northeast China).
Part of the larger region of Northern China ( Beifang), it lies north of the Qinling–Huaihe Line, with its heartland in the North China Plain. Most inhabitants here speak variants of Northern Chinese languages such as Mandarin Chinese, which includes the Beijing dialect and its cousin variants. The Beijing dialect is largely the basis of Standard Chinese (or Standard Mandarin), the official language of the People's Republic of China. Jin Chinese and Mongolian are also widely spoken due to the political and cultural history of the area.
Despite these challenges, some forms of agriculture have been successful in this region, especially animal husbandry, certainly of horse and camel, and possibly other types of animals. The crops Panicum Miliaceum and Setaria italica, both types of millet grain, are believed to be indigenous to northern China. Panicum Miliaceum is known from the Cishan culture in Hebei province, recovered as Phytoliths from pits in stratigraphic sections. Sediments from the pits have radiocarbon dates from 8500 to 7500 BCE. Archaeological evidence of charred grains found in early Holocene layers in Hebei province at Nanzhuangtou and Cishan has led scholars to revise the earliest dates associated with millet by about two millennia. Millet sites are concentrated along the boundaries of the Loess Plateau and Mongolian Plateau, separated by a mountain chain from the Huabei plain and the Dongbei plain, North China's main alluvial plains, located to the west. Millet cultivation was similarly situated relative to the Qinling Mountains at Dadiwan, and the Yitai mountains at Houli culture. Macrofossil evidence (charred grains of foxtail and broomcorn millet) has been recovered from Xinglonggou in Inner Mongolia, Xinle culture in Liaoning, Cishan in Hebei, and Dadiwan in Gansu, among other sites in Eastern and Central China.
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