The prehistory of the peoples called by the ancient authors "Bat viet" ("Bai yue" - i.e. " many (yue)") is the history of the culture created by the now extinct peoples in the territory that later became part of modern China. Archaeological excavations in Southeastern China, which began to be actively conducted in the 70s of the XX century, brought a number of remarkable discoveries that changed our ideas about the development of society and statehood not only in this region, but also in the Far East as a whole, revealing another hotbed of development of ancient civilizations. The article examines the main stages of the development of the culture of the Bat Viet peoples and the processes of formation, flourishing and decline of successive archaeological cultures that formed the Vietese community in Southeastern China during the period from the early Neolithic to the Early Iron Age, i.e. before the inclusion of the Vietese territories in the Western Han period (206 BC-8 AD) to the Chinese Empire. Geographically, the area of existence of the Vietnamese community and its preceding cultures is the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the valley of Lake Baikal. Poyanghu and the Ganjiang River, Taihu Lake, the Minjiang and Jiulongjiang Rivers, as well as the mainland coast of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. The present - day administrative boundaries of the People's Republic of China include the south of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces (south of the Huaihe River), Shanghai City District, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong provinces. Conventionally, I call this area Southeast China. Agriculture and the emergence of appropriating farming in Southeast China can be considered one of the oldest in the world. Already at the end of the last ice age, ceramics appear here (finds at the sites of Miaoyang, Xianrendong, etc., ca. 15-12 thousand years BC) [Kuzmin, 2004, p. 82-83]), and the first finds of rice grains belong to approximately the same time [Sato, 2002, p. 146 ... Read more