Astro-Historiographic chronologies of early China are unfounded

The chronology of ancient China has been debated for centuries. The long history of China is regarded with much pride in the nation today, and the lack of an accepted chronology of the early dynastic period has led to considerable vexation. In 1996, the State Council of China (Guowu yuan ) established a group that launched a major national research project, involving hundreds of researchers, whose goal was to resolve these debates.1 In 2000, the project published its report2: a chronology, relying on a record of a solar eclipse, was officially adopted. This has been pro-claimed as a major achievement of Chinese research. Despite that, a different chronology has generally been adopted in the West3: it is based on records of conjunctions of the five visible planets. The present work considers the merits of these two different approaches.