The venue is booked a year or more out, the deposit is paid, and then the email arrives asking whether that is a good day.
That is the order it happens in here, and it decides most of what I can actually do.
The almanac does not know who you are
Open a Chinese almanac, paper or app, and a given day carries lines like suitable: marriage, betrothal, engagement and avoid: breaking ground. Those verdicts are properties of the day itself, worked out from the twelve day officers, the twenty-eight lunar mansions and a long list of auspicious and inauspicious stars. The page is identical in Sydney and in Chengdu. It has never heard of you.
The single place it touches a person is the line that reads something like clashes: Horse. The day’s earthly branch is Zi, the Rat. Zi and Wu, Rat and Horse, sit opposite each other on the cycle and clash, so anyone born in a Horse year is told to stay away. That is one character. Your chart has eight of them, four pillars for the year, month, day and hour of your birth, and the zodiac animal is only the branch of the first pillar.
Judging a whole day against one eighth of a person is roughly as blunt as it sounds. It is good for cutting three hundred and sixty-five days down to a shortlist you can then work through properly.
What the work consists of
First, decide whose day it is.
A wedding takes both charts, with the bride’s traditionally carrying more weight in the old method. A shop or a business takes the owner, and where there are partners, whoever actually puts up the money and makes the call. Ground-breaking takes the person who holds the land. Moving in centres on the head of the household, though I look at everyone who will sleep there. Get this wrong and everything after it is aimed at the wrong target.
Then each candidate day’s stem-and-branch pair goes against that chart. Does it clash with their year or day branch, does it fight the annual pillar they are living under, and does it feed what the chart is short of or pile more onto what it already has too much of. The same Tuesday can be sound for a person born on a Jia Wood day and poor for a person born on a Geng Metal day, which is the distinction an almanac cannot make.
Then what the event wants. Weddings want combination, stems and branches that pair rather than oppose, and a day that sits still. Openings want a day with some movement in it. Moving in turns on the door and the stove, since what you are doing is bringing the household’s first breath into the place.
Ground-breaking is mostly a question of direction. You do not dig in the Tai Sui sector, the Grand Duke, which sits in the branch of the current year, nor in the San Sha, the three killings, which sit opposite the year’s trine. Yin, Wu and Xu years put the San Sha in the north, Shen, Zi and Chen years in the south, Si, You and Chou in the east, Hai, Mao and Wei in the west. This is a Bing Wu year, so the San Sha is north and the Tai Sui sits due south.
The Tai Sui and San Sha sectors are read off the year branch on the compass. They belong to the heavenly layer, and they have nothing to do with which side of the equator the sun is on, so they don’t reverse down here. That is the same dividing line I set out in the piece on why facing south fails in Australia: the stars don’t move, the earthly trigrams do. Some senior practitioners reverse the whole thing, and neither side can produce anything testable.
The solar terms are the other matter, and date selection cannot avoid them. Below the equator I read the terms swapped in use. The strength of the five phases through the year runs with the season: wood in spring, fire in summer, metal in autumn, water in winter. December in Sydney is summer, so it is read against the midsummer stretch, and June against midwinter. Take a Chinese almanac and pick Australian dates straight out of it and the stems and branches will be right while the strengths come out inverted. Inverted tidily, too, which is what makes it the most easily missed mistake I know of in this work.
Then the hour. There are twelve in a day, and the thing that actually happens (bride arriving, ribbon, first shovel) happens inside one of them. Wrong hour on a right day is still awkward.
In Australia there is usually very little to choose from
Weddings show this most clearly. The venue’s calendar, the Notice of Intended Marriage that has to be lodged at least a month before the ceremony, the photographer, the caterer, the relatives flying in and burning annual leave: by the time the question reaches me there are commonly two or three Saturdays left.
So I run all of them. Which of them does not clash with the people involved, and whether a mediocre day has an hour inside it that can carry the weight. Then I write a sentence that says this is the best of the three and not a good day in absolute terms. That sentence has to be there. Leaving it out would be dishonest.
Occasionally all three are bad and I say so. Whether the deposit is worth more than the date is theirs to work out.
People ask me for a date with an eight in it, or for the eighth of the month, because eight sounds like prosperity in Cantonese and Mandarin. That is number superstition. It has nothing to do with any of the above, and I won’t pretend otherwise to keep a client happy.
Moving in runs into settlement. The date belongs to the conveyancer and the bank, and in New South Wales six weeks after exchange is the ordinary shape of it. Which day the keys land in your hand is not yours to pick. Splitting the legal event from the ceremony solves most of it. Keys whenever the settlement lands, then the door opened and the kettle on at a chosen hour with rice and oil carried in, then the furniture whenever the truck is free. Removalists charge less midweek, so a clean Tuesday saves money as well.
Ground-breaking is further out of the owner’s hands still. When the development application and construction certificate come through, and when the builder has a slot, have nothing to do with auspicious days. What the owner can do is turn three shovels of soil on the block at a chosen hour before the machines arrive, keeping clear of the Tai Sui and San Sha sectors. After that the excavator comes when it comes.
Openings run into the lease. Rent starts on the commencement date whether the doors open or not, and on a decent strip that is real money every day the shop sits empty. Open and trade. Hold the ribbon, the offering and the lunch on a chosen day afterwards. Plenty of shops here do it that way.
Where a day begins, and why I am unsure
A stem-and-branch day starts at the hour of Zi, eleven at night. The question is whose eleven.
Sydney runs two hours ahead of Beijing, three during daylight saving. There is a window every day in which the two calendars disagree about which day it is, and when the day pillar changes the whole selection changes with it.
I use local time, on the reasoning that you are doing this thing in this place and the timing should sit under your own feet. Plenty of practitioners here use China time. Others argue for local apparent solar time, corrected for longitude. I have not seen an argument from any camp, my own included, that I found convincing. So I tell clients which convention I used and leave it on the page where they can see it.
What it cannot do
A business survives on its product, its site, its rent and the person running it. A house is good to live in because of its plan, its aspect and the neighbours. Marriages I don’t need to explain. None of that moves for a date.
What is left is narrower. It keeps you off a day that clashes with you for something you intend to last, and out of the ground where the Grand Duke sits. Anyone promising wealth or a lasting marriage on the strength of a date is selling you something else.
For anything involving illness, law or money, see a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant. That sentence is fixed in every report I write.
I have seen weddings held on carefully chosen days go badly, and weddings moved at three weeks’ notice with nothing consulted at all turn out well. I can’t put a number on how much the date counts for. Not zero.