Note 16 — YING HING SOO's PREFACE.

In prefaces and rhetorical exercises, the Chinese commonly call the years by the names employed in the well-known cycle of sixty years. The first cycle is supposed to have begun with the year 2697 before Christ. In the year 1804, the ninth year of Këa kïng, was the beginning of the thirty-sixth cycle.—Histoire générale de la Chine, XII. p. 3 and 4.