Totally different from this numerical system is that of the Chinese, who “divided the year into 12 months of 29 and 30 days each and as these periods represent with sufficient exactness the lunar month, it follows that the new moon falls on the 1st of every month and that on the 15th the moon is at its full. The month is thus associated with the moon and is called by the same name and written with the same hieroglyphic.... The Chinese also divide the year by seasons and recognize 8 main divisions and 16 subsidiary ones, which correspond to the days on which the sun enters the 1st and 15th degrees of a zodiacal sign ...” (Douglas, China, p. 269). Whilst it is customary in China for years to be designated at times by the Neen-haou or title of an emperor and an event to be alluded to as having occurred in such or such a year of a certain ruler’s reign, the mode of computing years is by reckoning by sexagenary cycles. According to native historians this system was introduced by the emperor Hwang-te in the year 2637 B.C. which was the first year of the first cycle, and it has continued in use until the present day. In this system a group of ten characters, termed the “celestial stems” and associated with the male principle, is combined with a group of twelve characters, named the “terrestrial branches” and associated with the female principle. An unbroken series of sixty-year cycles have thus been formed, in the seventy-sixth of which the Chinese are now living. According to Biot, the calendar instituted by Hwang-te was a day-count only, and year-cycles were not in use until after the Christian era, having been introduced from India. There are indications which will be more fully discussed further on, showing that the primitive day-count consisted of the seven-day period, each day being consecrated to one of the seven bright stars of Ursa Major, called the “Seven Regulators.” It is well known that Taouism was founded by Laou-tsze, who was a contemporary of Confucius and thus “lived in the sixth century before Christ, a hundred years later than Buddha and a hundred years earlier than Socrates. A mystery hangs over Laou-tsze’s history ... and there is the possibility that he was a foreigner, or perhaps a member of an aboriginal frontier tribe” (Legge).