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() It appears that there is some differences of opinion on this issue - though by this author's reckoning it is 4702:
http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/calendar/chinese.shtml#year
Quote from the link.............
Which Year is it in the Chinese Calendar?
Because of this web page, I get a lot of e-mail about the Chinese calendar. I once got an e-mail from a Spanish greeting cards company who needed to know which year 2000 CE would be in the Chinese calendar. The answer is that the Chinese do not have a continuous year count. They started counting from one again with each new emperor. However, from the Han dynasty, some scholars tried to reconstruct the ancient Chinese chronology, and it became customary to claim that the calendar was invented by the Yellow Emperor, Huáng Dě (黄帝), in 2637 BCE during the 61st year of his reign. However, many people prefer to start the count with the first year of his reign in 2697 BCE. Since these years are 60 years apart, it follows that 1984 was the first year of either the 78th or 79th 60-year cycle. Using this as a starting point, Chinese New Year in 2000 marks the beginning of the Chinese year 4637 or 4697. To give you an example of the level of confusion on this point, in Chapter 3 of Volume III of the translation of the Shoo King (shū jīng, 书经) by James Legge, he refers to the current year, 1863, as being in the 76th cycle, implying a starting point of 2697 BCE. However, the book has an appendix on Chinese astronomy, written by John Chalmers, where the starting point is taken to be 2637 BCE! Chalmers actually writes 2636 BCE, but that really mean -2636, using the astronomical year count, where 1 BCE is year 0, 2 BCE is -1, etc. This is fairly typical of the level of confusion about the continuous year count in the Chinese calendar, and simply illustrates the fact that the continuous year count is not an integral part of the Chinese calendar, but rather an afterthought. That's why I told the Spanish greeting cards company to stick with calling it the year of the Dragon!
To add to the confusion, some authors use an epoch of 2698 BCE. I believe this because they want to use a year 0 as the starting point, rather than counting 2697 BCE as year 1, or that they assume that the Yellow Emperor started his year with the Winter solstice of 2698 BCE.
I should also point out, that while Chinese chronology is fairly reliable going back to 841 BCE, and oracle bones with date inscription go back to the 13th century BCE, modern scholars consider the Yellow Emperor to be a mythological figure. So this whole discussion of ancient dates is just a curiosity.
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