CHINESE CHRONOLOGY. 63 
made the first scheme of his Annals, he began with the first 
year of king Wei-lieh, corresponding to our B.C. 425. “ After- 
wards,” it is added, “he extended his dates to the era of 
Kung-Ho. By and by he made his Examination of Antiquity, 
but he could find no dates of years earlier than that era. It 
was Shao K’ang-chieh* (died in 1077) who pushed the caleu- 
lations up to the first year of Yao.” We cannot blame this 
Shao, one of the most famous scholars in the Augustan period 
of the Sung dynasty and a contemporary of Sze-ma Kwang 
himself, we cannot blame him for what he did; but the 
note of Chi makes it plain that the cyclical dates assigned to 
events before B.c. 842, are the result of calculations by 
modern scholars of more or less ingenuity, but not com- 
manding our confidence as if they were drawn from express 
mention of them in ancient documents. Let us, therefore, 
take here a new departure from that era, or, for convenience 
sake, from 827, the first year of king Usiian, and try to find 
our way back, in the first place, to the commencement of the 
Chau dynasty. 
The Bamboo Annals, and Rise of the Chau Dynasty. 
8. We are confronted at this point by a chronology some- 
what different from that which is commonly received. It is 
known as that of the “ Bamboo Annals,” and professes to be 
derived from a source with which Sze-ma Ch’ien was un- 
acquaiuted. The story goes that in A.D. 279 some lawless 
parties dug open the grave of king Hsiang of Wei, who died 
In B.C, 296, and found a great number of bamboo tablets, con- 
taining on them more than 100,000 characters. A committee 
of scholars was, of course, appointed to sit on them and 
examine them. ‘The names of fifteen different Works, the 
tablets of which were more or less complete, were made out. 
Especially there was discovered a Book of Annals, beginning, 
hike Ch’ien’s Records, with the reign of Hwang Ti, and 
coming down to the year B.c. 299, the 16th year of the last 
sovereign of the Chau dynasty. There the tablets had lain 
for 575 years in the bosom of the earth, and now they were 
thus unexpectedly brought to ight :—were they genuine? A 
controversy necessarily arose on the subject, and it can 
hardly be said to be yet settled. The opinion of scholars is 
for the most part unfavourable to their genuineness; but I 
* See a note in my prolegomena to the third volume of The Chinese 
Classics, p. 83. 
