^{page 69 note 1} This is in my opinion the principal reason why the port of Khanfu, mentioned by the earliest Muhammadan travellers, or authors (Soleiman, Abu Zeid, and Maçoudi), cannot be identified with Hang-chou. The report of Soleiman, who first speaks of Khanfu, was written in 851, and in those days Canton was apparently the only port open to foreign trade. Marco Polo's Ganfu is a different port altogether, viz. Kan-fu, or Kan-pu, near Hangchou, and should not be confounded with Khanfu.

^{page 80 note 1} It may be of interest to statisticians of human life to compare with this average the duration of life of a number of Chinese national celebrities, both political and literary. The biographies of China's great men are mostly contained in the twenty-four Dynastic Histories, but it is not in every case that the exact year of birth and death of a man is given; the former especially is usually omitted, perhaps rightly so. The year of his death is certainly more important in a man's career than that of his birth; for one man may be fifty years old before he does the chief work of his life, while another may do it at the age of twenty-five and then die. Chinese biographers, therefore, often merely tell us that “he died in such and such a year at the age of so much,” or even let us infer the death year from some other fact, as if we were to say of Gustavus Adolphus, “he died in the battle of Lützen, thirty-eight years old,” leaving it to the reader to calculate therefrom the years of his birth and death. It was not till the beginning of the present century that the desirability of being informed on the duration of life as described in the various sources of Chinese biographical literature resulted in practical labour. Ch'ien Ta-hsin, a native of Chia-ting-fu, took the trouble to calculate from the biographical records the duration of hundreds of lives from the Han dynasty down to his own time, the last death recorded in his list being one in a.d. 1796. His work was published in 1812 under the title I-nien-lu, and was followed by a supplement in 1814, written by a native of Chêkiang, the two works being embodied in the collection of reprints called Yüeh-ya-t'ang-tsung-shu. Though these dates will scarcely help us to determine the length of a generation in China, the results possess some interest to the life statistician, who may wish to compare the following averages with our Western experiences. An abstract from the Chinese work referred to shows that out of 748 individuals whose lifetime could be ascertained by means of their biographies, there died—

The following special abstract, scanty though the material may be, will give us a clue as to the duration of life in China during ancient, as compared with modern times. It certainly does not confirm what Strabo reports of his Seres, if this name can at all be applied to the Chinese, viz. that they were a race of extraordinary longevity, said to exceed two hundred years (cf. Yule, , Cathay, xxxix, note 2Google Scholar).

There died—

(a) Out of 93 individuals born between the first century b.c. and the accession of the T'ang dynasty (a.d. 618)—

(b) Out of 336 individuals born since the accession of the Ming dynasty (a.d. 1368) up to the middle of the eighteenth century—

It must not be forgotten, when judging about these abstracts, that the lives to which they refer belong to men who made a mark among their countrymen, and that youthful deaths are, therefore, naturally excluded. On the other hand, many of the heroes of Chinese biography were generals who died in battle, or statesmen who lost their lives by punishment or crime.