The woman responsible for bringing this detail to light is Sheila Hsia Zeng Shao-ngo, 78, a descendant of those early Zengs. A member of the church and a Hong Kong native who now lives in Toronto, Hsia brought the documents to the Kowloon temple in 1997 so they could be digitally recorded and archived. The records represent only a fraction of the information about her lineage that Hsia has stored at her Toronto home - tracing 173 generations back almost 5,000 years, all the way to one of the first Chinese emperors, Huang Di, born in 2697 BC. Hsia hopes to bring the rest of the records to Hong Kong for archiving.

'Chinese people usually trace their genealogy back to Huang Di,' says Chin. 'But then for 1,000 years, they have only about 10 or 20 names to connect the whole lineage.' He says only about 5 per cent of the genealogies he's seen trace back, generation by generation, to 2,000 BC, but 'it is not common to be so detailed'.

The gathering and preserving of the genealogy represents a 25-year odyssey for Hsia, a vital-looking woman with a wide smile.

On a stopover in Hong Kong on her way to visit her son, Nelson, in Shanghai, she told the story of her family records.

'In 1949, when I was 23, I left China and moved to Hong Kong,' Hsia says. 'My husband moved to Singapore in 1967, and I followed in 1968, during the big riots. We raised a family - two girls and a boy, now 51, 53 and 58. In 1985, my husband passed away, and I moved to Toronto, where my eldest daughter works.

'I went back to China to visit my mother in Chongqing, with my five brothers and sisters, for the first time in 1979. It was a big reunion. I remembered when I was a little girl, we had in our family a red-covered book. My father always handled it very reverently because, he said, it contained the names of our ancestors.

'The book went back for 12 generations and included a sentence about more records going back 4,000 years. When I returned to China, I asked my mother what had happened to the book. She told me it was destroyed. I asked my brother, Zeng Shao-qiang [now 72], whether we could find any records. He told me there was a distant cousin where our grandfather lived, in Jiangxi province, who had some books.' Hsia says she thought it was important to find them because 'the church told us we should honour our ancestors'.

'My brother went to the cousin's village, Ao Yuan Keng in Feng Cheng county,' she says. 'The cousin, a farmer, said, 'If you want to see the books, you must prepare a banquet for three days and three nights.' After the great hunger in the 1960s, everyone liked to enjoy some luxury!

'They started the feast. The last night, my brother fed them lots of alcohol and drank with them. He opened the last book and found our father's name and our grandfather's name. The books went back to 1950 BC, when our first ancestor received the surname Zeng.'

Research Hsia did later connected that Zeng to Huang Di. '[The books] had been in a huge clay pot buried in the dirt floor under Zhu-wu's bed,' she says. 'Zhu's father handed the books to him in the 1920s. His father was a village leader. On his deathbed, he said: 'Keep these books and protect them with your life'.

'The books survived a fire that burned the village down in the 1940s and the Red Guards, who came through the village and destroyed most of its records in the 1960s.

'My brother copied 12 generations of names and dates and made a pedigree chart, which he sent to me in Singapore. I was very happy, but I told him I wanted photocopies of all the books. Shao-qiang and one of my sisters in China have the records, and now every year we have a reunion, and we read them together,' Hsia says. 'I get to know my ancestors and so many interesting stories about them. It's part of my mission in life. There are thousands of ancestors' names, historical details, dates, places and lots of interesting biography. Through the generations, our family kept moving south because of ethnic warfare. They moved to two different locations. There's an east group and a south group.

'Our most famous ancestor, Zeng Tsan, was Confucius' favourite student. Confucius wrote five books on Chinese culture, and Tsan wrote the sixth book, on honouring your parents and ancestors.

'We have another ancestor, Zeng Zhao, who was approached by the emperor in the Sung dynasty to be the national historian. It was Zhao who started compiling our family records. The books themselves are more than 700 years old.'

Hsia says she has compiled a 10th book covering recent generations. 'I'm a female. I wanted to add my father's sisters, my sisters, my daughters, my granddaughters,' she says. 'That makes it complete. It's 173 generations now because I added our generation.

'My cousin, Zhu-wu, still owns the books. My brother went there to ask if he could have the books, but no, he still wants to keep them. I don't know if he reburied them under his bed!'