What is the Chinese almanac?

An almanac combines a calendar with judgments about the days. Its months are often tied to the solar terms, the twenty-four points of the solar year. Each day is marked with a stem and branch from the sixty-day cycle, and with several further signs.

One sign is the day officer (建除), a sequence of twelve names that begins with Jian (Establish) and Chu (Remove) and repeats one per day. Another is a set of twelve spirits, divided into a yellow path and a black path. A third is one of twenty-eight lunar mansions, the divisions of the sky long used in Chinese astronomy, taken in turn from day to day.

It is also sold as Tung Shing. The word for "book" in Tongshu sounds like the word for "lose," so the name was changed to one meaning "win."

The most common use is finding a date for a wedding. People also consult it for funerals, moves, openings, contract signings, renovations and travel. Printed editions may add eclipses, tables for converting dates, moral stories and charts for reading faces and palms.

Different books have long disagreed about which days are good. The official handbook of the Qing court, the Xieji bianfang shu (協紀辨方書), itself quotes one view that ranks the officers Ping, Cheng, Kai and Wei highest and another that treats Chu, Wei, Ding, Zhi, Cheng and Kai as good.

The earliest calendars found in China date from a few centuries BCE. They were buried in the tombs of local officials on bamboo or wooden strips, along with manuscripts called rishu, or daybooks, which sorted lucky from unlucky days. Daybooks circulated from the late Warring States period into the Western Han.

Twelve-name systems of this type appear in the Jiudian Chu slips and the Qin slips of Yunmeng, in Qin and Chu forms that ran two months apart. Scholars working on the daybooks describe the Jianchu system as a foundation of standard daybooks. The Han work Huainanzi matches the names to the branches, in the month-based form that later became the main one.

The historian Alain Arrault describes calendars from around the start of the common era that already mark some days with spirits. Paper replaced bamboo and wood after the third century, and paper calendars appear around the fifth. Around the seventh century, day-by-day lists of suitable activities appeared in calendars, a change Arrault treats as a turning point in what a calendar was for.

From the Tang, the state claimed the sole right to produce calendars, but that right was hard to enforce. A British Library record notes an imperial ban on privately printed almanacs in 835. Finds from Dunhuang include a printed almanac of 877, among the earliest printed Chinese documents, and a calendar of 882 with an inscription naming Fan Shang of Chengdu.

Dunhuang calendars of the ninth and tenth centuries list hundreds of activities. Private printers kept working from the tenth century, and in the Yuan private versions called tongshu appeared, as life guides or as aids to the official text. A 2018 China Daily article gives a figure of about 3 million copies sold in 1328.

The Qing court tried to control the field. It commissioned the Xingli kaoyuan in 1713, and a revision of date selection begun in 1739 produced the Xieji bianfang shu, with a preface dated to the last lunar month of 1741, which fell in January 1742. The book set out to correct popular practice. China Daily reports that private tongshu were banned in 1723, without success, and that the ban was lifted in 1751. In 1798 Hong Chaohe founded the Jichengtang almanac in Quanzhou, which is still sold.

Legend credits the Yellow Emperor with creating the Yellow Calendar. We found no early evidence for that. One press account says the first character originally meant "royal" and was changed to the similar-sounding "yellow" after the monarchy ended in 1911.

The origin of the day officers is unclear. The trail reaches back to the late Warring States period and stops there, and no one knows who devised them.

The sales figure for 1328 comes to us secondhand. So does the statement that the Tang government printed the first calendars for public sale, and the surviving Tang examples we read about do not prove it. Different schools rank the officers differently, so a single good-or-bad label for any day reflects the book that was followed.