Perpetual Chinese Calendar

LunarCal  User's Guide 

Chinese Characters

If you know Chinese then you may skip this section. This page is documented to assist our non-Chinese friends.

In order to use LunarCal effectively, you need to understand / learn the few Chinese characters listed below:-

In the Chinese lunar calendar we use day number 1 (chu yi), day number 2 (chu er) and so on, until we reach say 11th day, we call it shi yi - "ten one". We drop the chu character for day numbers above 10. Eleven is thus represented as Chinese character 10 plus Chinese character 1. There are special characters for twenty, thirty, thousand, hundred million, etc.

The Chinese Lunar calendar is not complete without the Celestial Stems (tian gan) and Earthly Branches (di zhi). Unfortunately, to the less initiated Chinese, mere mention of the Celestial Stems and Earthly Branches makes them conjure images of fortune tellers, spirits and rituals. The Clestial Stems and Earthly Branches are very much an integral part of the Chinese calendar much like Christmas to the Gregorian calendar. Chinese fortune tellers base their work on this fundamentals. However, some readers may prefer to relate to the 'stars' such as Aries, Cancer, Leo, etc. There are 10 Celestial Stem and 12 Earthly Branches. These two terms have no equivalent English translations but literally translated Celestial Stems is "Heavenly Roots" and Earthly Branches is "Earthly Stems"

The year 2001 is the Sexagenary year of xin-si or metal[-]snake, the [-] denotes the negative stem. For year 2002, it will be the year of ren-wu or water[+]horse. The Celestial Stems and Earthly Branches are reused. When we run out of either one, we restart from the top of the list. For example, year 2003 is year of gui-wei or water[-]sheep. We have now run out of Celestial Stems, so for 2004 it will be the year of jia-shen or wood[+]monkey.

The Earthly Branches is analogous to Zodiac signs except that the Earthly Branches repeats once every 12 years and lasts for a full year, whereas the Zodiac signs repeats itself every year and last for one month. Thus it is impossible to link any Earthly Branch with a corresponding Zodiac sign.