'Then within the Egg was born, P'an Ku, the primordial man who slowly grew and grew until the Egg felt too cramped for him. Striking with all his might, P'an Ku split the shell of the Egg and burst free.

He then separated Yin and Yang into sky and earth, in which he was aided by the four most fortunate creatures that had emerged from the Egg with him. The Unicorn, the Dragon, the Phoenix and the Tortoise. They were engaged in this labor for 18,000 years and each day P'an Ku grew ten feet, using his own body as a pillar to force heaven and earth apart.

'When P'an Ku died, his breath became the wind and clouds, his eyes became the sun and moon. His stomach, head and limbs became the principal mountains of the world, watered by rivers of his sweat and tears; his flesh became the fertile soil and his hair the plants and tress which took root in it. The fleas on his body became the human race. Then P'an Ku drifted in space for a further 18,000 years before entering a holy virgin as a ray of light and being born into the world by her as Tien-Tsun, the First Cause.'

The earliest recorded appearance of the Ch'i-lin was to the legendary sovereign Fu Hsi c.2900 BC. Fu Hsi invented music, the set-square and compasses to measure the earth and taught the art of teaching, breeding of silkworms and domesticating animals. He and his wife restored order in the world after the monster Kung Kung had almost destroyed it, not least by their invention of marriage as a means of harmonizing the Yin and Yang of human nature.

One day, Fu Hsi was sitting at the bank of the Yellow River. He was pondering mortality and the problem of how to record his thoughts for posterity as writing was not invented yet. Suddenly a Ch'i-lin rose out of the waters and approached him. On its back it carried certain magical sigils from which Fu Hsi was able to devise the first written language of China.

The signs which inspired Fu Hsi were the Pa Kua or eight trigrams. These symbolic combinations of broken and unbroken lines are the basis not only of Chinese writing, but also of the philosophic and divinatory system which has been handed down to us as the I Ching, or Book of Changes. The I Ching conveys a distinct and original philosophy that helped create one of the world's great civilizations. Thus the Ch'i-lin, who helped create the world, also played a significant part in making it bearable for mankind.

As the world progress, the Ch'i-lin was almost forgotten. At this time there was a pious woman in the province of Lu at Tai Shan, whose only sorrow was that she and her husband had no son, for which she prayed constantly and fervently to heaven.

After a long while, she decided to make pilgrimage to a holy shrine in the mountains. On the way a Ch'i-lin appeared to her , knelt and dropped from its mouth a piece of jade bearing the inscription: 'The son of the mountain crystal, the essence of water, will perpetuate the fallen kingdom of Chu and be a King without a crown.'

In due course, the woman bore a son called Kung Fu Tse, better known to us as Confucius. Through his teachings, Confucius probably shaped the course of Chinese though and history more than any Emperor, without ever holding high office himself.

While writing his Spring and Autumn Annals, Confucius heard news that a strange beast had been killed nearby. Some say the creature ran into a chariot and was killed by accident; others said that the hunters were too quick with their spears. Either way the animal lay dead and abandoned at a crossroads.

Immediately Confucius went to have a look and recognized the creature at once and cried : 'It is a Ch'i-lin. The Ch'i-lin, benevolent beast, appears and dies. My Tao is exhausted.' Ending his Annals prematurely with an account of this incident, Confucius is then said to have laid down his pen and never written another word. However he seems to have written this poem after seeing the Ch'i-lin.