Happy Chinese New Year
Tomorrow, January 29, 2006, is Chinese New Year, the Year of the Dog. However, North America being 13 hours behind China, it is already January 29, 2006 there. To all my Chinese and Asian friends, a Happy and Prosperous New Year.
To continue the tradition that I started last year, 353 days ago (remember the lunar year is 354 days), here's some more Chinese trivia:
- We'll have a leap month this year. The eighth month will be called the leap seventh month. It runs from August 24 till September 21. It misses the autumnal equinox, which is on September 23, by two days.
- In traditional Chinese age counting (虚岁), a new born baby is one year old. And everybody's age gets incremented by one on Chinese New Year. So a baby born a day before Chinese New Year could be two years old a couple of days after birth.
- The animals are not officially part of the calendar. It is a way to ease the memorization of the official year name, which is an interesting numbering system in itself. Let me explain,
The Chinese year has a two character name. The first one cycles in a set of ten stems: 甲, 乙, 丙, 丁, 戊, 己, 庚, 辛, 壬, 癸. The second one cycles in a set of twelve branches: 子, 丑, 寅, 卯, 辰, 巳, 午, 未, 申, 酉, 戌, 亥. And the trick is that on the Chinese New Year, both characters are incremented. Thus the new year is 丙戌, while the year just ended is 乙酉.
Since lcm(10, 12) = 60, the two character year names cycle through every 60 years. As you can imagine, seeing the beginning of a new cycle (the year 甲子) is an exciting event, akin to seeing the beginning of a new century in western calendar. The cycle being 60 instead of 100 means that almost everyone get a chance to experience it. Very pragmatic. (But don't try to start a JSR for java.util.ChineseCalendar.)
Historical events are recorded in the two character year names, usually coupled with the dynasty name and the emperor's era name for disambiguation. The most important events are usually recognized by the two character name only. 甲午, for example, almost always refer to the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894. Similarly, 庚子 almost always refer to the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. 甲申 marks the fall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644, and 辛亥 marks the 1911 revolution that forced the Last Emperor of Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) to abdicate the next year, at the age of 6.
