Every February someone asks me what date Lichun falls on in Australia. It is in the thirties outside and Bondi is packed.
The date itself is easy. Lichun is the instant the sun reaches 315 degrees of ecliptic longitude, and that instant arrives simultaneously for everyone on the planet; only the clock reading differs. The harder question is what you are meant to do with it in Sydney.
A solar calendar, not the lunar one
Most people file the twenty-four terms under the Chinese lunar calendar. They belong to the sun.
Take the sun’s yearly circuit of the ecliptic. The December solstice sits at 270 degrees, and from there a cut every fifteen degrees, twenty-four cuts in all. Fix the degree and the moment is fixed with it. The moon plays no part in any of it, which is why the terms barely move against the Gregorian calendar: Qingming falls on the fourth, fifth or sixth of April every year, the December solstice on the twenty-first, twenty-second or twenty-third.
The Chinese calendar proper is lunisolar. Months follow the moon, twelve lunations fall about eleven days short of a tropical year, and the terms are what stitches the two together. Twelve of them, the jie, set the month branch: Lichun opens the Yin month, Jingzhe the Mao month, on down the year. A bazi month pillar changes at a jie and takes no notice of the first of the lunar month, which is where beginners most often go wrong. The other twelve, the zhongqi, govern intercalation: a lunar month containing no zhongqi is declared the leap month. That holds in most years. When two months in the same year come up empty, as they do in 2033, the rule cannot settle it by itself and the almanac authorities have to say which one doubles. Those are the years I always end up checking the tables.
Mean terms and true terms
One bit of calendar history worth carrying. The older method divided the tropical year into twenty-four equal stretches of time; the Shixian calendar of the early Qing switched to equal steps of longitude. The earth moves fastest near perihelion in early January, so terms around the December solstice sit just under fifteen days apart and those around June stretch past fifteen and a half. Every charting tool today runs on the longitude method. How much that unevenness matters once you are reading strength off a chart, I have never worked out.
What flips down here
The degrees do not flip. The moment does not flip. Two people born at the same instant, one in Sydney and one in Xi’an, share a month pillar.
The application flips.
My working rule is to keep the names and the degrees exactly as they are and swap the seasons when applying them. What the terms are for is heat and cold, and the seasonal waxing and waning of the five phases: wood strong in spring, fire in summer, metal in autumn, water in winter. Longitude is only the ruler. What it measures follows the ground you stand on. So when I pick a date here in December I count it as the fire stretch of the year, and June as the water stretch.
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. Stems and branches are unchanged, and the Nine Periods are the same period worldwide. Only the layer that has to land on this particular patch of ground turns over.
| Term | Longitude | Gregorian | Central China | Sydney |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lichun, spring begins | 315° | ~4 Feb | start of spring | high summer |
| Chunfen, March equinox | 0° | ~20 Mar | equal day and night, mid-spring | equal day and night, mid-autumn |
| Lixia, summer begins | 45° | ~5 May | start of summer | late autumn |
| Xiazhi, June solstice | 90° | ~21 Jun | longest day | shortest day |
| Liqiu, autumn begins | 135° | ~7 Aug | start of autumn | late winter |
| Qiufen, September equinox | 180° | ~23 Sep | equal day and night, mid-autumn | equal day and night, mid-spring |
| Lidong, winter begins | 225° | ~7 Nov | start of winter | late spring |
| Dongzhi, December solstice | 270° | ~22 Dec | shortest day | longest day |
The names don’t match what’s outside the window
Sydney sits a shade under thirty-four degrees south. July is the coldest month and January the hottest, each lagging its solstice by about a month, as in the north. Cold air arrives from the south and southwest off the Southern Ocean, so the southerly is the cold wind here, and the northwesterly is the hot one that brings fire weather with it in summer. Whatever warmth the old texts attach to a south wind is void.
Several of the names have nothing to attach to. Minor Snow and Major Snow: Sydney gets no snow, the Blue Mountains manage a fall every few years, the coastal suburbs go decades without. Frost Descends is real enough if you go west, where Penrith and Richmond wake up white in July; the harbour suburbs might manage one morning a decade. Lidong, the start of winter, lands in early November, which here is the fortnight when the jacarandas come out and half the city is photographing them.
While we are on cold. Australian houses are a thing people only find out about after they move. Older brick places have essentially no insulation, most have no central heating, and a household gets through July on one reverse-cycle unit in the living room. Sydney’s winter averages sit well above Shanghai’s, and everyone who arrives from Shanghai spends their first winter cold indoors. None of which has anything to do with solar terms. I just end up saying it every year around now.
Qingming and the seventh-month rites are the two that people feel most. Qingming lands in early April, deep autumn here, and the leaves don’t come down until May or June. The seventh month usually spreads across August and September, the tail of winter, wattle out yellow along every road. The contrast the calendar assumes, a wet cold Qingming and a sweltering ghost month, is not on offer.
Where it bites
Date selection is where the damage gets done. The strength or weakness of a day is counted against the season, so a Chinese almanac used straight for Australian dates yields stems and branches that are perfectly correct and strengths that are inverted, inverted tidily enough that nothing on the page looks wrong. That is set out in the piece on date selection and I won’t repeat it here.
In bazi it lands on the month command. The month branch carries more weight than any other character in the chart. Climate correction is more direct still: the saying that a winter month wants fire for warmth is a statement about cold weather, and the cold month here is June. I judge it by the local season, for the same reason as in Feng Shui, and the detail is in the piece on the useful god and the taboo god.
How far the swap should carry, though, I have not settled. If seasonal strength turns over, do the hidden stems inside the month branch turn with it? If climate correction turns over, does the whole apparatus of structure need adjusting with it? For now I turn over the reading of strength and leave everything else alone, which is a line I drew rather than a line I argued my way to. Feng Shui has the easier job, since it can lean on the plain fact that north is the hot side here. A chart is layered, and moving one layer tugs at three others.
Working out when the luck pillars start ignores hemispheres altogether. You count the days to the neighbouring jie and convert three days to a year. Counting is counting anywhere on earth; the piece on luck pillars and annual luck covers it.
The field is split
The above is how I work. Other practitioners do it differently.
The strongest objection I have heard: a solar term is an astronomical definition, so changing how it applies is quietly changing the definition, and a discipline’s frame of reference ought not move around with the person using it. Not a light argument, and I have sat with it. There are practitioners who read seasonal strength off the northern months with no alteration, which is internally consistent. Whether their readings land is their own ledger.
My side of it: the twenty-four terms began as a farming calendar, built to tell a farmer when to sow and when to bring the crop in. What they measure is heat and cold. The sowing season here is the other one.
The disagreement shows up only at the last step. Both camps compute the same instant of transition and produce the same stems and branches. So when you go to someone for a reading, ask whether they judge seasonal strength by the local season or by the northern months. Either answer is workable. Someone who has never thought about the question is a different matter.
Follow my rule far enough and the dog days go with it. The third geng day after the summer solstice opens the first fu period, and if the summer solstice reads as December down here, that puts it in January. I have never seen a book say what the southern hemisphere should do about fu days. That one is my own extension, and I say so before I use it.