Perpetual Chinese Calendar

LunarCal  User's Guide - Features

Chinese Lunar Calendar

The main objective of the program is the enumeration of the Chinese Lunar Calendar. This is the default screen displayed on startup:-

The focus of the display is the current lunar month of the Chinese Lunar calendar. Each lunar month comprises 29 or 30 days and may span two consecutive Gregorian months. For example, the above shows the 2^nd lunar month for 2001. The 1^st day of the lunar month falls on Friday February 23, 2001 and the last day of the lunar month falls on Saturday March 24, 2001. If the display shows the 1st lunar month as indicated by (see picture below) then the 1^st day of the lunar month 1 is also the Chinese New Year.

Today's date is enclosed in a box. The 1^st and 15^th days of the every lunar month have special meaning to the Chinese and thus is highlighted yellow accordingly.

The lunar calendar does not display for the 1^st lunar month, instead is uses the special more meaningful character zheng to denote the 1st lunar month of the year.

For example, the 1^st lunar month for lunar year 2001 is:-

The Chinese lunar calendar has big (30 days) and small months (29 days). The number of days in any lunar month is not fixed nor follows any pattern like the Gregorian calendar such as Jan has 31 days, Feb has 28 days (29 in leap year), etc. The Chinese lunar calendar also does not have leap days, instead it has leap months (intercalary month) inserted into the year according to specified rules. The leap month is not inserted at fixed locations such as Feb 29 in the Gregorian calendar. For example, year 2001 is intercalary in the 4^th lunar month:-
 

Note the Chinese does not have the equivalent of Monday, Tuesday, etc but uses a phrase "week day number". For example, Monday is and Tuesday is and so forth. Sunday is an exception - it is not week day number 7 but