CHINESE CHRONOLOGY. 69 
Fan, the Five Tien, the Eight Soh, and the Nine Chit. A 
visitor from another and more civilized State, to whom the 
boast was made, intimated that he hardly believed it, and 
made the lord of Ch’d ill by his reply. Whether his scepticism 
went so far as to deny the existence of the Three Fan and 
other books we cannot tell. No Chinese writer whom I 
have consulted, however, ventures to go so far. Ma Twan- 
lin says that “the books have perished, and what is said 
about them in those two passages need not receive much 
consideration.” Many critics and scholars, however, have 
not shown Ma’s good sense. K’ung An-kwo, a descendant 
of Confucius of the 2nd century B.c., thought that the Three 
Fan were the same as the Books of the Three Hwang in 
the Chau Kwan, and that of “the Five Tien” we have por- 
tions in the first two Books of the Shai, which are called 
the Tien or Canons of Yao and Shun. The Eight Soh are 
supposed to have given an explanation of the Yi King; 
and if there ever were such a book, I am sorry for the loss 
of it more than for that of all the others. The Nine Ch’id, it 
is thought, may have been a statistical account of the nine 
regions or provinces into which the country was divided. 
But the Soh and Chi are gone, and Ma Twan-lin says 
nothing to exempt the Five Tien from the same fate; 
nor does he refer to a publication of our 11th century, 
which purported to be a recovery of the Fan, but, which 
Chinese scholars generally have consigned to the limbo of 
things 
“ Abortive, monstrous, and unkindly mixed ;” 
in other words, have regarded as a poor attempt at forgery. 
But that expression in the Chau Kwan, “the Books of the 
Three Hwang and Five Ti,” has led to an amount of chrono- 
logical speculation of which it is necessary that I should take 
some further notice. 
I will say nothing about the Books; they confessedly 
perished long ago, unless we have a fragment of them re- 
maining in the Canons of Yao and Shun. But as to the men 
themselves—if they ever existed—who were they? Ma 
Twan-lin makes them out to have been Fu-hsi (often called 
Fo-hi, and said to be the founder of the Chinese nation), 
Shin Nang, the father of husbandry and medicine, and 
Hwang Ti. This was not Ch’ien’s view, for, as we have seen, 
he makes Hwang Ti the first of the Five Ti, and in his 
chronological table he has no name, either of Hwang or Ti, 
before him. 
Ma was influenced, no doubt, by what is said in the 
