The Chinese Almanac: How the Tongshu Guides Everyday Dates

What a day’s entry contains

The book is organised around the days of the year, and for each day it offers a dense summary of that day's character. A typical entry gives the day's position in the sexagenary cycle of stems and branches, its place in the lunar month and among the solar terms, and, most importantly for our purpose, lists of activities that are suitable and unsuitable for that day. The suitable list might include marrying, travelling, opening a business, moving house, signing agreements, or beginning construction; the unsuitable list warns against the same kinds of actions on days judged unfavourable for them. A reader with no special training can therefore look up a proposed date and see at a glance whether the day is considered fit for the task in hand.

Everything else the almanac carries

Around this core the almanac gathers a remarkable variety of other material. It carries the framework of the two calendars, lunar and solar, that Chinese life has long run on together, marking the solar terms that guide farming and the lunar months that order festivals. It notes the phases of the moon, the festivals and their customs, and often much else besides: charts for interpreting dreams, guidance drawn from physiognomy, tables from other branches of the tradition, advice on health and the seasons, and a miscellany of proverbs and practical lore. In this way the single volume came to serve as a household reference for a whole world of traditional knowledge, with date selection as its organising spine.

How to actually read one

A first encounter with an almanac page is disorienting, because the information is dense and the layout assumes you already know the conventions. It is worth walking through it once, since the arrangement has been stable for centuries and learning it takes a few minutes.

The day is identified at the top, usually with the Gregorian date, the lunar date and the day's stem-and-branch pair. Beneath that sit the classifiers: which of the twenty-eight lodges is on duty, which of the twelve day officers governs, the day's nayin phase. Then come the two lists that most readers actually use, yi (宜) and ji (忌) — do and do not.

Around these are several smaller notices that repay attention because they are the ones people misread. The chong (冲) line names the zodiac animal in direct opposition to the day, and by convention a person born under that animal should avoid taking the leading role in whatever is being done. The sha (煞) line gives a compass direction to be avoided. The taishen (胎神) line locates the "foetal spirit" somewhere in the house — a bed, a door, a stove — and traditionally forbids repairs or disturbance at that spot in a household with a pregnant woman. There will also be a table of the twelve double-hours marking each as auspicious or not, which is what people consult when they want a time as well as a date.

Once this is clear, one observation follows immediately. Everything above the yi and ji lines is the working; the two lists are the answer. The almanac's convenience lies precisely in showing the answer and hiding the working, which is also why almost no user is in a position to check it.

Where the information comes from

The information packed into each day's entry comes from the very systems that the other pages of this subcategory describe. The suitable and unsuitable activities are not arbitrary; they are the distilled results of the older methods, the qualities of the stems and branches, the notional stars and spirits assigned to each day, and the categories of favourable and unfavourable influence, all reduced to a form that requires no calculation from the reader. What a specialist would work out from first principles, the almanac supplies ready-made. This is the source of both its convenience and its limitation: it offers a general judgement of the day, but not one tailored to a particular person or a particular family.

The editions do not agree

Because compilation passed down through families, each with its own inheritance and its own judgement about which spirits to count, almanacs from different houses do not produce identical entries. This is not an occasional slip. It is a structural feature, and it follows directly from the history described on the previous page: the body of spirits was contradictory before the Qing editors pruned it, and different lineages pruned it differently.

The disagreements are usually small in appearance and large in implication. One edition marks a day suitable for marriage; another omits it. One forbids breaking ground; another says nothing. Where two editions both mention an activity they will usually agree, since the core rules are shared, but the margins differ enough that a family consulting two books can receive two answers.

Digital versions have multiplied the effect rather than resolving it. Calendar applications draw on whichever source their developer chose, and they do not say which. A village once shared a single almanac and therefore a single answer; two people at the same table can now hold two incompatible ones, usually without either knowing that a choice of edition was ever made on their behalf.

A state monopoly

The history of the almanac is itself revealing. In imperial times the calendar was a state monopoly, and the official version carried the emperor's authority; to print a rival calendar was, at times, a serious offence, because regulating time was a prerogative of the throne. The almanac that reached ordinary homes descended from this official calendar, and something of its former authority still clings to it. With the end of the empire the monopoly lapsed, and the almanac passed fully into commercial hands, but it did not lose its readership. Through the twentieth century and into the present it has continued to be printed in large numbers, adapting its contents to changing life while keeping its traditional core.

The almanac today

Today the almanac survives in both old and new forms. Printed editions are still sold, especially around the new year, and their contents have migrated to websites and mobile applications that will tell a user, at a tap, whether a given day suits a wedding or a move. The persistence of the book across such a change of technology says something about the place it holds: it is consulted less as a matter of firm belief than as a matter of custom and reassurance, a way of not beginning an important thing on a day the tradition would count as wrong.

The commercial setting has changed even if the format has not. A printed almanac was sold once and made no further demands. An application has an incentive to return users daily and to place the day's entry next to something that can be bought: a paid reading, a personalised chart, a charm, a bracelet said to counter the year's clash. The material is the same; the business model around it is not, and the difference matters because the older form did not profit from making anyone anxious.

It is also worth noting how thoroughly this content has escaped its original context. Many people who would firmly deny believing in any of this glance at the day's yi and ji lines out of habit, in the same spirit as a horoscope column. That casual use is probably the commonest relationship anyone now has with Chinese divination, and it sits somewhere between custom and decoration rather than belief.

A test you can run yourself

This suggests a check that anyone can perform, requires no expertise, and settles more than any amount of argument: take two or three almanacs or apps from different sources and compare what they say about the same day.

The usual result is disagreement. It is worth doing rather than merely reading about, because the experience of seeing two confident and incompatible entries side by side is more persuasive than being told they exist.

The reasoning is simple and does not depend on any position about cosmology. If the auspiciousness of a day were a property of the day, independent sources would not return different answers about it. That they do tells you that what is being reported is an editorial tradition rather than an observation. This is not a hostile argument imported from outside; it is the same problem the Qianlong compilers identified and tried to fix, reappearing as soon as the state monopoly that had concealed it was lifted.

What it can and cannot offer

It is worth being clear about what the almanac can and cannot offer. As a record of a tradition it is invaluable, and as a piece of living culture it is fascinating. As a guide to which days will actually bring good or ill fortune, it rests on the same classical assumptions as the rest of date selection, assumptions that modern knowledge does not bear out. Consulted with that understanding, the almanac is best seen as a cultural companion and a store of custom rather than as a reliable forecast, a book that tells us a great deal about how the Chinese have organised time and much less about what any given day will bring.

One further point belongs here, about how to hold all this. Finding that the editions disagree does not oblige anyone to throw the book away. An almanac remains a genuinely useful object: it converts between calendars, it tracks the solar terms, it records what customs expect, and it supplies a shared reference point that lets a family settle a date without a quarrel. Those functions survive the discovery that no day is intrinsically better than any other, because none of them ever depended on it.

What changes is the weight placed on the two short lists. Read as a record of custom, they are informative. Read as a forecast, they promise something the book has no way to know and, as the comparison test shows, does not consistently claim even from one edition to the next.

Key points

• The almanac — tong shu, “book of everything”, or huang li — is the familiar face of date selection.

• It is organised by day, with each entry summarising that day’s character.

• A typical entry gives the day’s place in the sexagenary cycle and lists suitable and unsuitable activities.

• It also carries both calendars, festival dates, and a wide range of other practical material.

• Its judgements are derived from the systems described elsewhere in this subcategory.

• In imperial times the calendar was a state monopoly and the official almanac carried state authority.

• Printed editions still sell, especially around the new year, alongside digital versions.

• It is invaluable as a record of tradition; its day-by-day judgements are not established fact.

Sources drawn on for this article include: Richard J. Smith's studies of the Chinese almanac and of divination in traditional Chinese society; and the general scholarship on the imperial calendar and its passage into popular print.