The fact is there is no special reason for doubting either chronology or sequence of events up to about 2357 B. C., in which year the Patriarch Yao came to the throne. He was the first of those three, Yao, Shun, and Yu, who have been ever since the patterns for all Chinese rulers who have aspired to be Confucianly good. "Be like Yao, Shun, and Yu; do as they did";-- there you have the word of Confucius to all emperors and governors of states. Yao, it is true, is said to have reigned a full century, or but one year short of it. This is perhaps the first improbability we come to; and even of this we may say that some people do live a long time. None of his successors repeated the indiscretion. Before him came a line of six sovereigns with little historic verisimilitude: they must be called faint memories of epochs, not actual men. The first of them, Fo-hi (2852-2738), was half man, half dragon; which is being interpreted, of course, an Adept King;--or say a line of Adept Kings. As for the dates given him, I suppose there is nothing exact about them; that was all too far back for memory; it belongs to reminiscence. Before Fo- hi came the periods of the Nest-Builders, of the Man-Kings, the Earth-Kings, and the Heaven-Kings; then P'an K'u, who built the worlds; then, at about two and a quarter million years before Confucius, the emanation of Duality from the Primal One. All this, of course, is merely the exoteric account; but it shows at least that--the Chinese never fell into such fatuity as we of the West, with our creation six trumpery millenniums ago. This much we may say: about the time when Yao is said to have come to the throne a manvantara began, which would have finished its course of fifteen centuries in 850 or so B. C. It is a period we see only as through a glass darkly: what is told about it is, to recent and defined history, as a ghost to a living man. There is no reason why it should not have been an age of high civilization and cultural activities; but all is too shadowy to say what they were. To its first centuries are accredited works of engineering that would make our greatest modern achievements look small: common sense would say, probably the reminiscence of something actual. Certainly the Chinese emerged from it, and into daylight history, not primitive but effete: senile, not childlike. That may be only a racial peculiarity, a national prejudice, of course.