Archaeoastronomy in East Asia: Historical Observational Records ...

One suspects that it is the comet’s reappearance without a tail that is being reported in shorthand. Indeed, comparison with European reports of the behavior of this comet confirms this interpretation (Kronk, 1999).

Comets are frequently described as having a wei, “tail”; mang, “rays”; guangmang, “bright rays”; mangjiao, “ray-like horns”; and yan, “flames,” which change in length, brightness, or direction. The term mang literally refers to the “beard” or awn of a head of grain, a more descriptive word than the conventional expedient “rays” adopted here. Meteor showers are commonly recorded as liuxing, “falling/streaming stars,” and this term is uniformly translated as “meteors.” Liu, “flow/stream,” used to refer to their motion, is generally translated as either “fell” or “streamed.” Of course, “fell” implies a downward trajectory, but this is not necessarily the implication of the records. English equivalents of Chinese technical terms—azimuths, linear measures (i.e., du, cun, chi, zhang); double hours of the day and night; night watches; interactions between celestial bodies—as well as geographical coordinates of historical capitals of China, Japan, and Korea are provided in appendices B and C. In the records from all three traditions, the appearance of a comet or meteor may be likened to a cup, bowl, bottle, melon, peach, pear, papaya, hen’s egg, and so on. There are no reliable indications of angular size for these common similes.

Detailed discussion of the historical sources for astronomical observations from China, Japan, and Korea and the terminology conventionally employed in Chinese observational records may be found in the references (Ho, 1966; Xu, Pankenier & Jiang, 2000; Stephenson & Green, 2002, Yang et al., 2005). Detailed star charts showing the locations of Chinese asterisms and their Western equivalents may be found in Ho (1966) and Stephenson (1994) and for the earliest period in Sun and Kistemaker (1997). The charts from Ho (1966) are reproduced in appendix D.

Throughout the period during which the Japanese and Korean observations were made, the calendars of both were essentially identical to the calendars in use in China at the time. From the Former Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 23) on, year counts of Chinese emperors were periodically restarted with the initiation of so-called reign periods, as in 104 BC when commencement of the Taichu “Grand Inception” reign period commemorated the beginning of a new cosmological epoch and calendrical system.