any historical documents, and they had never been recognized and investigated). The decoration of Yangshao pottery was similar to the decoration of Anau and Tripolje pottery in Central Asia and Europe, and both of them have similar spiral patterns. Therefore, Andersson hypothesized that Chinese painted pottery could have spread from the west. He believed that the Ancient China and Central Asia could have passed through Xinjiang and Gansu regions. In order to prove the hypothesis of a "West Origin", Andersson, in his capacity as a staff member of China's National Geological Survey, conducted archaeological excavations in the provinces of Gansu and Qinghai, in the following years, 1923–24, again in collaboration with his Chinese colleagues, and he published numerous books and scientific papers on Chinese archaeology, many in the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, which he founded and launched in 1929, and in it, he published his most significant scientific reports on his own work, including the book Preliminary Report on Archaeological Research in Kansu published in 1925. Andersson's archaeological activities and the view of Chinese culture which originated in the west caused a great uproar in China. The excavations by Chinese archaeologists, such as Li Ji, Fu Sinian, and Liang Siyong, based on their excavations in Yinxu and Chengziya, indicated an independent root for Chinese civilization. Despite this fact, it can be said that Andersson paved the way for the foundation of modern Chinese archaeology. Andersson's most well-known book about his time in China is Den gula jordens barn, 1932, translated into several languages, including English (as Children of the Yellow Earth, 1934, reprinted in 1973), Japanese, and Korean. For an extensive bibliography of Andersson's works, and a comprehensive discussion of his and his colleagues' archaeological research in China, see M. Fiskesjö and Chen Xingcan, China before China: Johan Gunnar Andersson, Ding Wenjiang, and the Discovery of China's Prehistory. Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities [Östasiatiska museet], 2004. In 1926, Andersson founded the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden (Swedish: Östasiatiska museet), a national museum established to house the Swedish part of the collections from these first-ever scientific archaeological excavations in China. Andersson served as the director of the MFEA until he was succeeded in 1939 by the famous Swedish Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren. Collection Selections of the Swedish portion of the materials is on display at the MFEA in a new permanent exhibit launched 2004.