[100] The 28 Siou are not of equal extent, and there are many discrepancies in the Chinese tables which profess to give the number of degrees attributed to each. In the diagram, therefore, only the stars which compose the three adjoining domiciles, Niu, Hiu, and Wei are noted, and they are connected by straight lines, according to Chinese astronomical custom. There is in the great History of China a description given of a reformation of the calendar carried out by the Emperor Tchuen-Hio, whose date is placed at 2510-2431 B.C. The conjunction of the sun and moon close to the Siou Hiu is in this description clearly referred to as a mark given for the beginning of the year. But the fact of this choice of the star mark Hiu has, for European scholars, been obscured by a most unfortunate paraphrase made use of by Père de Mailla, the translator into French of the _Histoire Générale de la Chine_. He gives us in the passage describing Tchuen-Hio’s reformation the phrase, “15° du Verseau,” instead of the Chinese expression, “the Siou Hiu.”[101] [101] The fact that P. de Mailla has so paraphrased the Chinese original has thus plainly been attested by the late Professor Legge. In answer to a question addressed to him on the subject, he wrote, in December 1894, to Mr. H. W. Greene, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, as follows: “In the passage from P. de Mailla’s History, that writer is both translating and paraphrasing ‘the star group Hiu.’” [Illustration: PLATE XIV. Domiciles Niu, Hiu and Wei, of the Chinese Lunar Zodiac.] The Siou Hiu extends over some eight or ten degrees of the ecliptic in the constellation Aquarius; to restrict to _one_ degree the given star mark was an inaccuracy serious enough in an astronomical statement, but this inaccuracy is as nothing when compared with the further entire distortion of facts occasioned by P. de Mailla’s use of the ambiguous phrase, “15° du Verseau,” ambiguous because it can be taken to refer either to the fifteenth degree of the _sign_, or of the _constellation_ “du Verseau” (Aquarius). The Siou Hiu is situated, as stated above, in the _constellation_ Aquarius (see diagram), but astronomers reading P. de Mailla’s translation have understood the phrase in its technical sense, and have therefore been led to believe that the Emperor Tchuen-Hio fixed the beginning of the Chinese year to the 15° of the _sign_ Aquarius; and as, astronomically and technically speaking, the 15° Aquarius (sign) has no reference to any star or constellation, but is only that point of the ecliptic to which the sun attains exactly at the mid-season between winter solstice and spring equinox, they have taken for granted that 2,500 B.C. the Chinese year began at that point, and therefore at the same season as it does at the present time.