of the week. Hindu astrology adopted the concept of days under the regency of a planet under the term vāra, the days of the week being called āditya-, soma-, maṅgala-, budha-, guru-, śukra-, and śani-vāra. śukrá is a name of Venus (regarded as a son of Bhṛgu); guru is here a title of Bṛhaspati, and hence of Jupiter; budha "Mercury" is regarded as a son of Soma, that is, the Moon. Northeast Asian languages East Asian tradition The East Asian naming system for the days of the week closely parallels that of the Latin system and is ordered after the "Seven Luminaries" (七曜 qī yào), which consists of the Sun, Moon and the five planets visible to the naked eye. The Chinese had apparently adopted the seven-day week from the Hellenistic system by the 4th century CE, although by which route is not entirely clear. It was again transmitted to China in the 8th century CE by Manichaeans, via the country of Kang (a Central Asian polity near Samarkand). The 4th-century CE date, according to the Cihai encyclopedia, is due to a reference to Fan Ning (范寧), an astrologer of the Jin Dynasty. The renewed adoption from Manichaeans in the 8th century CE (Tang Dynasty) is documented with the writings of the Chinese Buddhist monk Yijing and the Ceylonese Buddhist monk Bu Kong. The Chinese transliteration of the planetary system was soon brought to Japan by the Japanese monk Kobo Daishi; surviving diaries of the Japanese statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga show the seven-day system in use in Heian Period Japan as early as 1007. In Japan, the seven-day system was kept in use (for astrological purposes) until its promotion to a full-fledged (Western-style) calendrical basis during the Meiji era. In China, with the founding of the Republic of China in 1911, Monday through Saturday in China are now named after the luminaries implicitly with the numbers. Pronunciations for Classical Chinese names are given in Standard Chinese. Numbered days of the week Days numbered from Monday The ISO prescribes Monday as the first day of the week with ISO-8601 for software date formats. The Slavic, Baltic and Uralic languages (except Finnish and partially Estonian and Võro) adopted numbering but took Monday rather than Sunday as the "first day". This convention is also found in some Austronesian languages whose speakers were converted to Christianity by European missionaries. In Slavic languages, some of