Chinese Calendar - the Year 2025

The year 2025 is the Year of the Wood Snake, and the Lunisolar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, will begin on Wednesday, January 29, 2025. Some say that the year of the snake will be a time of transformation for snakes, and that those who are adaptable and creative may have opportunities for improved finances and love. The lucky color for 2025 is blue, which is said to promote wisdom, clarity, and calmness.

The traditional Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar dating from the Han dynasty that combines solar, lunar, and other cycles for various social and agricultural purposes. While the Gregorian calendar has been adopted and adapted in various ways, and is generally the basis for China's standard civic purposes, aspects of the traditional lunisolar calendar remain, including the association of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac in relation to months and years.

The traditional calendar used the sexagenary cycle-based ganzhi system's mathematically repeating cycles of Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches. Together with astronomical, horological, and phenologic observations, definitions, measurements, and predictions of years, months, and days were refined to an accurate standard. Astronomical phenomena and calculations emphasized especially the efforts to mathematically correlate the solar and lunar cycles from the perspective of the earth, which, however, are known to require some degree of numeric approximation or compromises. The general use of the Gregorian calendar includes the observing traditional lunisolar holidays.

中国历法是根据太阳和月球运转法则制定的，是世上唯一的！

The Chinese calendar is formulated based on the laws of the movement of the sun and the moon, and it is the only one in the world!

Heavenly Stems & Earthly Branches

Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches are two sets of signs in a certain sequence, which were created by ancient Chinese people to calculate the history and record the chronological sequence of events.

The Origin of Heavenly Stem and Earthly Branches

As early as about 2700BC, the ancestor of Chinese nation, Yellow Emperor (Huangdi), sent Da Rao Shi to create a calendar system. Da Rao Shi explored the rule of changes between sky and earth, as well as that of the four seasons. Then he created ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches to make combinations representing a sexagenary cycle. A year can be represented by the composition of two characters, one from the heavenly set, and one from the other. That is believed to be the start of the stem-branch calendar. Thus came a way of counting time which has been passed down through thousands of years.

干支纪年法 (sexagenary cycle-based ganzhi system)

The Heavenly Stems

Earthly Branches  

Earthly Branches can be used to count time of years, months and hours. When counting years, people use them with the 12 Chinese zodiacs and strictly one Earthly Branch corresponds to one fixed zodiac. For example, our ancestors have divided a day and night into twelve sections and named each as a 时辰(shi chen), which is equal to today's two hours and has a fixed Earthly Branch name. From 11 pm at night to 1 am is decided to be the first one 子时(zi shi), then the second two hours 丑时(chou shi), on the analogy of this.

The Twelve Zodiac Animals (English) | CGCMall.com

Take the year of 2025 for example, 2025 is also called as 乙巳年(yǐ sì), a combination of the second sign in Heavenly Stems and the sixth one in the Earthly Branches.

The year 2025, defined by the Heavenly Stem 乙(yǐ) sector (Wood of five elements) and the Earthly Branch 巳(sì) sector (Fire of five elements), forms a dynamic interaction of Wood and Fire energies.

有畫說藝： 2025是蛇年，老人說「青蛇閏六月，紅衣度雙春」，有何講究？

致遠書香: 中國的農曆有多厲害？中國的傳統曆法才是最科學的，是了不起的中國智慧！

中國古人對宇宙概念的解釋，宇是空間，宙是時間。時間無窮無盡，空間無邊無際、讓人對自然充滿敬畏。中國農曆把太陽、月亮、二十四節氣都包含其中，雖然看起來覆雜，但是用起來會發現人們會發現即使不用看日曆看日月星辰也能推算出日子。當我們翻看農曆，會發現很有樂趣，它不僅僅是一個簡單枯燥的數字，我們看到任何一個日子都能知道月相的大致狀態，利用農曆還可以推算出潮汐的變化起伏等等。它和大自然密切相關，又和中國文化緊密相連。