60 REV. PROFESSOR JAMES LEGGE, M.A., ON 
Grand Historiographer, and after the usual period of mourn- 
ing entered on the task which had been entrusted to him. 
In five years, “amidst the stone chambers and metal coffers” 
of the Imperial library, he had brought his ‘ Records” 
down to the year B.c. 104. As he was continuing his 
labours, in B.C. 98,in consequence of his connection with 
Li L’ing, the leader of an unsuccessful expedition against 
the Hsiung-nfii or Huns, a Turkic people on the north, he 
incurred the imperial displeaure, was thrown into prison, and 
suffered a cruel mutilation. Even there he did not cease 
from his labours. There is at least one passage in his work 
referring to events that took place in B.c. 91. 
Such was Ch’ien, and such was his preparation for the 
great achievement of his life. He has been called “ the 
Herodotus of China,” but I do not think that the com- 
parison of him to the author of “The Nine Muses ” does him 
justice. We have no occasion, however, to speak of the nature 
and execution of his book, which has been the model of all 
the subsequent dynastic histories, excepting as regards the 
chronology of Chia to which all that I have thus far said 
has been introductory. 
The First Certain Date of B.C. 842. 
5. Ch’ien begins his records, we have seen, with the reign 
of Hwang Ti, which commenced, according to the usual 
tables, in the year B.C. 2697. But he himself did not venture 
to assign that or any other date to it. He did not find 
among the documents, to which he had access, any ancient 
era by their distance from which the recorders or annalists 
had been in the habit of showing the sequence of events in 
their national history. <A list of sovereigns and of the 
lengths of their several reigns was the only method which 
there was of fixing the chronology of the past. And it 
would be a sufficiently satisfactory method if we had a list 
of sovereigns, and of the years that each reigned, that was 
reliable and complete. But we do not have this. The first 
year to which Ch’ien ventured to annex the cyclical expres- 
sion of its date (of which cyclical expression I will speak by 
and by) was the 88th of Li, the 10th of the kings of Chau, 
and corresponding to the year, in our reckoning of time, 
B.c. 842. From that date downwards the names of the first 
vears of the several cycles are all entered in Cl’ien’s chrono- 
logical table. The year in question, B C. 842, called Kang-shan, 
was the first of the period known as Kwng-Ho, or “ Har- 
