Chinese New Year Snake. Many online Chinese Sign calculators do not account for the non-alignment of the two calendars, using Gregorian-calendar years rather than official Chinese New Year dates. One scheme of continuously numbered Chinese-calendar years assigns 4709 to the year beginning, 2011, but this is not universally accepted; the calendar is traditionally cyclical, not continuously numbered. Although the Chinese calendar traditionally does not use continuously numbered years, outside China its years are sometimes numbered from the purported reign of the mythical Yellow Emperor in the 3rd millennium BCE. But at least three different years numbered 1 are now used by various scholars,
Chinese calendar 4609 Huángdì year, assuming a year 0 of 2698 BC. The change was adopted by many overseas Chinese communities, such as San Francisco's Chinatown. During the 17th century, the Jesuits tried to determine the epochal year of the Han calendar. In his "Sinicae historiae decas prima" (published in Munich in 1658), Martino Martini (1614–1661) dated the ascension of the Yellow Emperor to 2697 BC and began the Chinese calendar with the reign of Fuxi (which, according to Martini, began in 2952 BC. Philippe Couplet's 1686 "Chronological table of Chinese monarchs" ("Tabula chronologica monarchiae sinicae") gave the same date for the