descendants of Confucius. In the reign of K'ang-hsi, twenty-one
centuries and a half after the death of the sage, they amounted to
eleven thousand males. But their ancestry is carried back through
a period of equal extent, and genealogical tables are common, in
which the descent of Confucius is traced down from Hwang-ti, in
whose reign the cycle was invented, B.C. 2637 [1].
The more moderate writers, however, content themselves
with exhibiting his ancestry back to the commencement of the
Chau dynasty, B.C. 1121. Among the relatives of the tyrant Chau,
the last emperor of the Yin dynasty, was an elder brother, by a
concubine, named Ch'i [2], who is celebrated by Confucius, Ana.
XVIII. i, under the title of the viscount of Wei. Foreseeing the
impending ruin of their family, Ch'i withdrew from the court; and
subsequently he was invested by the emperor Ch'ang, the second
of the house of Chau, with the principality of Sung, which
embraced the eastern portion of the present province of Ho-nan,
that he might there continue the sacrifices to the sovereigns of
Yin. Ch'i was followed as duke of Sung by a younger brother, in
whose line the succession continued. His great-grandson, the duke
Min [3], was

l See Memoires concernant les Chinois, Tome XII, p. 447 et seq.
Father Amiot states, p. 501, that he had seen the representative
of the family, who succeeded to the dignity of ­l¸t¤½ in the ninth
year of Ch'ien-lung, A.D. 1744. The last duke, not the present, was
visited in our own time by the late Dr. Williamson and Mr. Consul
Markham. It is hardly necessary that I should say here, that the
name Confucius is merely the Chinese characters ¤Õ¤Ò¤l (K'ung Fu-
tsze, 'The master K'ung') Latinized.
2 ±Ò.