According to the Annals of the Bamboo Books phœnixes, male and female, arrived in the autumn, in the seventh month, in the fiftieth year of the reign of Hwang Ti (B.C. 2647), and the commentary states that some of them abode in the Emperor's eastern garden; some built their nests about the corniced galleries (of the palaces), and some sung in the courtyard, the females gambolling to the notes of the males. The commentary of the same work adds that (among a variety of prodigies) the phœnix appeared in the seventieth year of the reign of Yaou (B.C. 2286), and again in the first year of Shun (B.C. 2255). Kwoh P‘oh states that, during the times of the Han dynasty (commencing B.C. 206 and lasting until A.D. 23), the phœnixes appeared constantly. In these later passages I have adopted the word phœnix, after Legge and other Sinologues, as a conventional admission; but, as will be seen from all the extracts given, there are but few grounds for identifying it, whether fabulous or not, with the phœnix of Greek mythology. It reappears in Japanese tradition under the name of the Ho and O (male and female), and, according to Kempfer, who calls it the Foo, "it is a chimerical but beautiful large bird of paradise, of near akin to the phœnix of the ancients. It dwells in the high regions of the air, and it hath this in common with the Ki-Rin (the equivalent of the Chinese Ki-Lin), that it never comes down from thence but upon the birth of a _sesin_ (a man of incomparable understanding, penetration, and benevolence) or that of a great emperor, or upon some such other extraordinary occasion." It is a common ornamentation in the Japanese temples; and I select, as an example, figures from some very beautiful panels in the Nichi-hong-wanji temple in Kioto. They depart widely from the original (Chinese) tradition, every individual presenting a different combination of gorgeous colours; they only agree in having two long central tail feathers projecting from a plumose, bird-of-paradise-like arrangement. These can only be accepted as the evolution of an artist's fancy; nor can any opinion be arrived at from the figure of it illustrating the _'Rh Ya_, of which I reproduce a _fac-simile_. I have already stated that Kwoh P‘oh's illustrations have been lost. [Illustration: FIG. 91.--THE FUNG HWANG. (_From the 'Rh Ya._)] The frontispiece to this volume is reduced from a large and very beautiful painting on silk, which I was fortunate enough to procure in Shanghai, by an artist named Fang Heng, otherwise styled Sien Tang; it professes to be made according to the designs of ancient books. The original is, I believe, of some antiquity.