This research used samples and/or data provided by the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP). ODP is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and participating countries under management of the Joint Oceanographic Institution (JOI). We thank the ODP Leg 184 shipboard scientific party for sampling the cores. We similarly thank the ODP curator Dr. John V. Firth for enabling us to obtain additional samples necessary for this study and for helping us fix mistakes on the numbering of some figures. We express our sincere thanks to Dr. H. Brinkhuis (University of Utrecht) and Dr. G.L. Williams (Geological Survey of Canada, Atlantic) for their helpful discussion and for microscopic examination of some important taxa during the 2001 dinoflagellate short course in Urbino, Italy. We gratefully acknowledge critical comments and constructive suggestions provided by Dr. L. de Verteuil and an anonymous referee that greatly improved the quality of the paper. We also extend our thanks to Dr. S. Piasecki (Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland) for providing us with reprints of his papers that proved very useful in our study. Finally, we thank Dr. Jan Jansonius (Geological Survey of Canada, Calgary) for editorial review and improvements to the English text. The present paper is part of the project "The Marine Records of the East Asian Paleo-Monsoon" (number 49999560), which is fully supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.