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 "Ming Pao" () reckoned 1905 as 4603 (using a year 0 of 2698 BC). Liu Shipei (, 1884–1919) created the Yellow Emperor Calendar, with year 0 as the birth of the emperor (which he determined as 2711 BC). There is no evidence that this calendar was used before the 20th century. Liu calculated that the 1900 international expedition sent by the Eight-Nation Alliance to suppress the Boxer Rebellion entered Beijing in the 4611th year of the Yellow Emperor. The plum-rains season (), the rainy season in late spring and early summer, begins on the first "bǐng" day after "Mangzhong" ()