Clio/The Dragon In the Sky

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The Dragon In the Sky

Clio has a confession to make. She does not know a great deal about the customs of the East. In case this comes as a surprise, note that Clio is not omniscient, and she only goes where her name is known and said. The Chinese know little of her, and in return she knows little of them.

Clio is not alone in this. One reason she has made the Middle Kingdom a subject of especial study in recent years is to try to bypass this uncomfortable trend, where Westerners and Easterners remain mysterious to one another, and thus continue to perceive each other as enemies.

The average Westerner's acquaintance with the Chinese lunar calendar is confined to placemats with amusing pictures of animals in restaurants. Although Clio hardly considers herself expert on the subject, she believes she can provide slightly more information than that.

Sun vs. Moon Redux

Clio has elsewhere discussed the reasons why a purely lunar calendar will "float" - that is, the months will occur in different seasons as time goes on - and the solutions which have been tried to circumvent this. That discussion should be read, as a preamble to this.

The Chinese lunar calendar, strictly speaking, is a lunar-solar calendar. The Chinese name for their old-style calendar is yin-yang li. Although "yin" and "yang" are not the actual terms for "moon" and "sun," the reader will recognize them as the opposing principles of Chinese philosophy.

The old Chinese calendar contains a solar method of reckoning, based on twenty-four seasonal periods, and a lunar method with twenty-nine- or thirty-day months, which has since its inception been adjusted to the Metonic system (adding seven months over a nineteen-year period, so the lunar year will not fall too far out of step with the solar year).

In addition, the old calendar uses a system of naming rather than numbering years, based on a sixty-year cycle ... and the Chinese system of astrology uses a somewhat different sixty-year set of names.

Finally, as if these weren't enough, China switched over officially to the Gregorian calendar in 1912, when the Ch'ing dynasty was overthrown and the new rulers were anxious to Westernize. However, it didn't really catch on until 1949, when the Communists came to power and insisted upon its use.

This is a great deal to sort out, so we had best begin.

Tracking the Seasons

The solar portion of the old Chinese calendar consists of twenty-four periods of roughly half a lunar month each. "Roughly half" because these periods are all exactly the same size, but lunar months are not. Each solar period is fifteen degrees of solar movement at the equator. These periods were mapped out in a time of naked-eye astronomy, when the Chinese (and everyone else) believed that the sun revolved around the earth.

The twenty-four periods, being based on solar movement, have the advantage of always falling at the same time each year. Their names reflect this; the periods are named after seasonal phenomena, such as "spring starts," "frost falls," "great heat," and so forth. The solstices and equinoxes are duly noted in the correct places.

The Chinese New Year, Hsin Nien, is partially dated by lunar methods and partly by solar: It begins at the second new moon after the winter solstice (based on the moon as seen from China, which means that other places may see the new moon a day earlier). This puts it on or around the beginning of February every year, which means that the first period of every year is "spring starts."

Watching the Moon

The Chinese, as everyone else, soon realized the need to stabilize their lunar year. They hit on the Metonic system gradually. When the Chinese add "leap months" they give them the same name as the preceding month, plus a "leap" designation.

Chinese names for months used to be based on an elaborate system similar to the sixty-year cycle described below. However, it is not clear how commonly these names were used, if ever. Almost since the beginnings of the old calendar, Chinese months were called simply Yiyue, "one-month," Eryue, "two-month," Sanyue, "three-month," and so on. When the Gregorian calendar was adopted, these very practical but somewhat unpoetic names were retained.

While Clio is on the subject of unpoetic yet practical nomenclature, it is perhaps useful to consider the Chinese days of the week.

The seven-day week - the concept of "week" itself - is fundamentally a Christian idea. This idea was brought to China by missionaries, who named Sunday "Worship Day" (Libaitian) and numbered the other days based on that. Early in the twentieth century, an alternate set of names was proposed, with no religious overtones. Under this system, the word for "week" was xingqi, "star period." The days are written as "week" followed by a number: xingqi yi, xingqi er, and so forth. Sunday is written by putting the two characters for "week" followed by the character for "sun" - xingqi ri.

(The "sun" character means "day" when used in dates, just as the "moon" character means "month," so Clio leaves it to the reader's interpretation whether the final day of the week is Week-Sun or Week-Day.)

When the Communists came to power in 1949, anything that smelled even faintly of Christian terminology was eradicated, so the "xingqi" system won by default.

Cycles and Animals

A question Clio has often been asked is "What year is it in the Chinese calendar?" Those who ask this are generally expecting a large number, somewhere in the five or six thousands, because they know that Chinese civilization has been around for a long time, and expect that the Chinese have been numbering years consecutively since the duration of memory.

But it isn't so. Before the Ch'ing overthrow in 1911-1912, years were numbered sequentially, but the count was reset every time a new emperor came to power. Any such numbering was lost in 1911 when the Gregorian year officially became the sequential one.

However, there is also a tradition of counting the number of sixty-year cycles which have occurred since 2637 BCE, when the calendar was supposedly invented. Clio will permit her readers to do the arithmetic on their own.

As for the cycles themselves:

Each year has a name which is in two parts: The "celestial stem" and the "terrestrial branch." There are ten stems and twelve branches. The first year of a cycle is named with the first stem and first branch, the second year with the second stem and second branch .... As one runs out of stems and branches, each set repeats. Clio can best show this by a partial example:

Stem     Branch    Gregorian Year
...
8        8         1991
9        9         1992
10       10        1993
1        11        1994
2        12        1995
3        1         1996
4        2         1997
...

These two cycles resynchronize (with the tenth stem and twelfth branch) in the sixtieth year, after which the names start over again.

The names for the stems have no other meaning, and do not translate into English. However, the names for the branches have names of animals associated with them. In some cases, these are not the same names for the animals which would ordinarily be used. 1988 was wu chen, fifth stem and fifth branch. 1988 was a year of the Dragon, but "chen" is not the normal word for dragon ("long" is), nor are the characters anything alike. These particular animal names apparently occur on the calendar only.

The Chinese system of astrology uses these animal names, in the same sequence, but uses an entirely different means of arriving at a sixty-year cycle. In addition to the animal names, there is a cycle of elements: wood, fire, metal, water or earth, in that order. So if 1999 is a Wood Rabbit year (as indeed it is), then twelve years hence from 1999 will be a Fire Rabbit year.

There are many other aspects to the "Chinese Zodiac," which Clio would not care to discuss here even had she the time to do so. See the Attic for more.

Persistence of the Lunar

The Chinese, in Clio's opinion, somehow contrive to simultaneously be a practical and a superstitious people. Although in present-day China the Gregorian calendar rules, the old calendar has not vanished and shows no sign of doing so. Desk and printed calendars give both styles of date.

There are several possible reasons for this. Older Chinese, especially, still keep their birthdays and significant anniversaries by it, but even younger citizens with a great deal of birthdays to keep track of find that the animal years are a helpful mnemonic.

Also, most of the more traditional holidays are placed on the calendar based on their old-style date, not the Gregorian date. Finally, soothsayers (what you would call fortune-tellers) use the old dates, and Clio is disconcerted to see how much of this still goes on - but that is a topic for another, far distant, day.

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