The Chinese chronicles from which we derive our knowledge of the past history of Weihaiwei and the adjacent country are those of Wên-têng in four volumes, Jung-ch'êng in four, Ning-hai in six and Weihaiwei (that is, the Wei of Weihai) in two. The first three are printed from wooden blocks in the usual old-fashioned Chinese style, and this means that recently-printed copies are far less clear and legible than the first impressions, which are unfortunately difficult to obtain; the last (that of Weihaiwei) seems to exist in manuscript only, and is consequently very rare. It is from these four works chiefly, though not solely, that the information given in the rest of this chapter, as in many other parts of the book, has been culled; and while endeavouring to include only such details as are likely to be of some interest to the European reader, I trust there will be enough to give him an accurate idea not only of the history of Weihaiwei but also of that prodigious branch of Chinese literature of which these works are typical. The traditions of Weihaiwei and its neighbourhood take us back to the days of myth. The position of this region at the end of a peninsula which formed, so far as China knew, the eastern limit of the civilised world, made it, as we have seen, the fitting birthplace of legend and marvel. Not content with taking us back to the earliest days of eastern Shantung as a habitable region, the legends assure us of a time when it was completely covered by the ocean. Thousands of years ago, it is said, a Chinese princess was drowned there.[21] She was then miraculously turned into a bird called a _ching wei_, and devoted herself in her new state of existence to wreaking vengeance on the cruel sea for having cut short her human life. This she did by flying to and fro between land and sea carrying stones in her beak and dropping them into the water one by one until, by degrees, they emerged above the surface and formed dry land. Thus her revenge for the drowning incident was complete: she punished the sea by annihilating it.