Chinese calendar

The Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar formed by combining a purely lunar calendar with a solar calendar. In modern times Chinese usually use the Gregorian Calendar for most day to day activities, but the Chinese calendar is still used for the dating of traditional holidays such as Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) and the Mid-Autumn Festival and in astrology, including choosing the most auspicious date for a wedding or the grand opening of a building. The primary use in day to day activities is for determining the phase of the moon, which is important for farmers and is possible because each day in the calendar corresponds to a particular phase of the month. Other traditional east Asian calendars are similar to if not identical to the Chinese calendar: the Korean calendar is identical, the Vietnamese calendar substitutes the cat for the rabbit in the twelve animals,

Holidays

The Chinese calendar year has nine main festivals, seven determined by the lunisolar calendar, and the other two derived from the solar agricultural calendar. (Note that the farmers actually used a solar calendar, and its twenty-four terms, to determine when to plant crops, due to the inaccuracy of the lunisolar traditional calendar. However, the traditional calendar has also come to be known as the agricultural calendar.)

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The two special holidays are the Tomb-Sweeping Festival and the Winter Solstice Festival, falling upon the respective solar terms, the former occurring at ecliptic longitude 15 degrees, the latter at 270 degrees. As for all other calendrical calculations, the calculations use civil time in China, eight hours ahead of UTC.

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