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This numbering system is briefly explained on the page devoted to Periods of Chinese History, which contains links back to these tables. It is also used elsewhere on this web site, especially in the interactive data base of Chinese terms and names.
Dates: Dates given here are the so-called "long chronology," traditionally used by historical Chinese authors. There is substantial disagreement between chronologies until 841 BC, so it is extremely unlikely that the dates given here before that time are even remotely accurate.
Note on Imperial Titles: Each emperor is known to history by a dynastic name and by a reign name. Before the Ming dynasty, emperors often changed their reign names every few years, so only the more stable dynastic names are normally used, and they alone are given here (the "reign name" columns being blank). During the Ming and Qing periods, however, only one reign name was used per reign, and, inconsistently, historians refer to those reigns by the reign names rather than the dynastic names. For those two dynasties, both names are given. Neither of these names was actually the personal name of the emperor, but rather of the period of his reign. (Although one speaks of Queen Victoria, since Victoria was here name, one speaks of the Kang1xi1 Emperor, not "Emperor Kang1xi1." Since the personal names are almost never used, they are not included on these tables. Note that many names are duplicated over time. Confusingly several dynasties have an emperor called Gao1zong1 ("great ancestor"), for example. Thus it is conventional in Chinese to precede the name of the emperor with the name of the dynasty: Tang2 Gao1zong1. English authors are less consistent about this.
How to Find an Emperor: To locate a particular reign, use the "find" function of your browser. To facilitate searches, each syllable is represented here as a separate word with the tone number at the end instead of a tone mark. If your browser allows wildcard characters in searches, you can substitute a wildcard. Otherwise you will need to search on one syllable until you find the right compound. (In these tables the Pinyin letter ü is represented as yu to facilitate searching.)
Chinese Characters in the Tables: The Chinese characters in this table are coded in "big-5" codes, used in Taiwan to represent traditional Chinese script. If you are using a relatively new browser and your system has the necessary fonts, the characters may appear by themselves. If they do not, then if you have a Chinese viewer for web pages (such as the shareware Chinese Web Viewer from Linktech), it should be set to B5. If you do not use a Chinese web viewer the characters will be scrambled, but the Romanized parts of the table will work fine. If you don't care about the characters anyhow, you should be quite happy with that.
Navigation: Because the full table is long, it is divided into three separate files, each of which contains a series of separate tables. Links at the top of each page should enable easy navigation, but each file is about 20K and, perhaps because tables are complex, is a slower download than one might imagine. Be patient and think of China.
Introduction
This table allows you to locate the dates, correct Romanization, and Chinese characters for any dynasty or reign in Chinese history. All Chinese dynasties are numbered, and so are the emperors within them.