ETHNOLOGY, ETC., OF CHINA. 205 
thought that he vouches for all the dates or eras in that long space. 
The first year to which he ventures to annex the cyclical expression 
of its chronological date is B.C. 842. I cannot go into the reasons 
which he had for doing so. They were abundantly sufficient ; and 
his history from that year downwards will not, I think, be ques- 
tioned by any one capable of forming a judgment on such a matter. 
From that year Ch-ien was left to push his way among the abundant 
materials in his possession. And he did so, carefully and skilfully, 
up, as I have said, to Hwang Ti. But the cyclical or chronological 
expression for his reigns and eras was not introduced into tables 
till the year 1077 A.D., when the arrangement of them was first 
completed by a Shao Khang-chieh, one of the great scholars of the 
Sung dynasty. 
The results for the earlier time given to us by those tables con- 
duct us to the commencement of the dynasty of Chow, the third of 
the feudal dynasties of China in B.C. 1122; of the second dynasty, 
or that of Shang (called latterly Yin), in B.C. 1766, and that of 
first, or Hsia in B.C. 2205. 
A somewhat shorter scheme is found in what are called the 
‘‘ Bamboo Books,” discovered after the death of Ch-ien, amd the 
genuineness of which has been much questioned, but the difference 
between the two is not very great. The dynasty of Hsia, according 
to these books, began in 1961. The founder of it was “ the Great 
Yi,” who cleared away the waters of the great flood of Yao, a 
terrible inundation of the Ho and other rivers with which the docu- 
ments of the Shi king commence, and which to many have seemed 
a Chinese version of the Flood of Noah. Yii also was the founder 
of the feudal monarchy which displaced the elective, and continued 
till B.C. 22Y, or fully 2,000 years. 
To help him in his records from Yi to Yao, Ch-ien had still the 
earliest books of the Shai King, though they are not so valuable as 
the documents posterior to Yi. Still, according to the tables made 
out from them, Yii’s reign begins in B.C. 2205; that of Shun, who 
preceded him, begins in 2255; and that of Yao in 2357. 
We have now to plunge into the shadowy ages before Yao, and 
see if we can find in them traces of what we can consider historical 
narrative. There must have been men,—subjects and rulers,— 
anterior to Yao. I do not think, indeed, that Sze-ma Ch-ien had 
written documents with dates in them earlier than those of the Sha 
King; but he has prefixed a chapter to his account of Yao professing 
to give an account of five Tis, generally, though erroneously, called 
