64 REV. PROFESSOR JAMES LEGGE, M.A., ON 
am not concerned to adjudicate here in the strife. Let us 
accept the years of the Bamboo Annals as one scheme of 
chronology, and those of Sze-ma Kwang, ordinarily received, 
as another, and see the difference between them. Ch’ien, as 
we have seen, fails us altogether after B.c. 842. - 
The two schemes enumerate the ten kings of the dynasty 
before Hsiian, agreeing also in their order and in their names. 
Five of the reigns are also of the same length—36, 26, 55, 
12, and 35 years respectively ; the other five are shorter in 
the Bamboo scheme, being of 6, 19, 9, 8, and 26 years, in- 
stead of 7, 51, 15, 16, and 51. The ten in the longer scheme 
amount to 295 years; in the shorter, to 223. These two 
numbers, added to 827, give B.c. 1122 and 1050 as the year 
when the Chau dynasty commenced. The difference between 
them is only 72 years. 
In the last chapter of his works, and wishing to make the 
distance as short as he possibly could, Mencius says that 
“from king Wan to Confucius there were 500 years and 
more.” He, no doubt, intended his “from king Wan” to be 
equivalent to “from the beginning of the Chau dynasty,” and 
his “500 years and more” to be equivalent to “more than 
500 years and less than 600.” In this way we have to . 
conclude that the era of Chau was between B.c. 1051 and 
1151. The date of 1122 cannot be far from the truth. 
To the Rise of the Shang Dynasty. 
9. We go on next to the dynasty of Shang, or Yin which 
preceded Chau. The received chronology assigns to it 28 
reigns and 644 years; that of the Bamboo Books 30 reigns 
and 508 years. The dynasty began, according to the 
former, in B.C. 1766; according to the latter, in 1558. 
The differences in the number of reigns is unimportant and, 
if the schemes otherwise agreed, would only affect the length 
of the dynasty by six years. In the 15th of the Books of 
Chau in the Shi Ching, the names of three of the Shang 
sovereigns are given, and the lengths of thei reigns, 75, 
59, and 33 years,—to show how Heaven crowns a good king 
with long life and sway. The two schemes agree in the 
length of those reigns and of five others. Pan Ka, the his- 
torian of the first Han dynasty, made the duration of the 
Shang to be 529 years, and there is a statement in the Tso 
Chwan that it lasted 600 years. In the passage of Mencius 
to which I have already referred, he says that from T’ang 
the founder of Shang, to King Wan of Chau there wer 
“500 years and more.” From all this we may conclude that 
