Multi-system calendar:  Time, revolution and modernity

This calendar gives the year in three different reckonings: “Republic of China Year 18” -- the Republic of China was declared in 1912 “sui order yiji year”-- this refers to the 60 year cycle in the “stem and branch” system “Western calendar One thousand nine hundred twenty-nine to thirty” – i.e. the Gregorian calendar The daily calendar that runs on either side of the illustration is actually two calendars, running side by side:  the yin 隱, or lunar, calendar, and the yang 陽, or solar, one.  This kind of “dual-system” calendar was quite common in 1929, and printed in the hundreds of thousands in Shanghai and other cities – not just in poster form, but also as almanacs, flyers, cards and newspaper inserts.  Nonetheless, the dual-system calendar was technically illegal at this time, the subject of a ban by the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government.  Why would a dual-system calendar have existed, and why would the government have considered it dangerous?

I: Calendars and political power

When Sun Yat-sen declared the founding of the Republic of China on January 1, 1912, he also declared a fundamental change in the way every citizen of the new nation was to measure time. Instead of relying on the variety of available methods of calculating time based primarily on the phases of the moon, as most in China had up until that point, all henceforth were to follow the solar calendar.  For Sun, as for many Chinese reformers of his generation, the solar calendar (by and large they meant the Gregorian calendar) represented not just a means of ordering days and months, but a revolution, an international system, and modernity itself.  For China not to do as Japan already had and shift to the system used by “civilized” nations (i.e. Europe and America) would endanger the very survival of the nation itself.

The reworking of time in the cause of revolution was nothing new, of course.  Examples range from radical experiments such as the French revolutionary calendar to the longer-term inculcation of civic holidays common to the construction of modern nationalism.  Often revolutionaries and reformers framed the change in terms of a shift from divine to human right, in the European context secularizing and democratizing a calendar formerly centered on the church and the monarch. 

The calendar was also deeply rooted in cosmology and political authority in the Chinese case, but in a rather different configuration.  In imperial times the regulation and compilation of the calendar had been the domain of the emperor.  In his role as pivot between heaven and earth, the emperor was required both to obtain an understanding of cosmological forces and to enable his subjects to live in perfect social order.  Thus his ability to determine the most accurate calendar possible and distribute it annually – with great ceremony – to his officials was an essential part of his “cosmological kingship.”  Moreover, it ought to be his sole prerogative, and thus successive dynasties severely restricted the circulation of both calendars and the astronomical equipment essential for calculating them.  Not surprisingly, one of the first acts of rebels seeking to overthrow the emperor was to issue a calendar of their own:  the Taiping Rebellion provides only the most elaborate example out of many.

In addition, the public designation of years was intimately tied to imperial rule.  Beginning in the Han dynasty, emperors began to adopt nian hao 年號 or “era names” (sometimes also referred to as “reign names”) carrying auspicious meanings.  In early dynasties emperors changed nian hao often – as frequently as every year or even after several months – depending on the circumstances; by the Ming and Qing, nian hao remained stable throughout a single emperor’s reign, and thus the names we commonly use to refer to many of these men – such as Kangxi or Qianlong – are in fact the names of their reigns.  Formal documents, therefore, would often be dated with the nian hao year (e.g. “Kangxi 7.”) 

Thus it was this legacy, in all its different aspects, that Sun Yat-sen and his fellow revolutionaries wanted to eliminate by establishing a new calendar.  Declaring 1912 Year One of the Republic of China symbolized a fresh start associated with no single man, but with a nation. Counting time using the same system that fellow revolutionaries around the world did showed that this nation would be part of the modern world.  In this sense, having a calendar that simultaneously marked years of the Republic and the so-called “Western calendar” was not a contradiction, but a necessity.  After 1912, successive Republican governments tried to enforce adoption of the new solar calendar; when Sun Yat-sen’s successors in the Nationalist Party gained power in China again in 1927, they made it a priority.

II: Calendars and social life As officials of the imperial government had discovered much earlier, however, even the most stringent legal controls could have little effect over the rhythms of local life.  Farmers and merchants were eager for information which could aid their enterprises, and the successive booms in printing and commerce that began during the Song dynasty fed such appetites.  Despite the restrictions on circulation of official calendars, then, trade in illicit and counterfeit calendars flourished.  The rather different genre of almanacs, which contained calendrical and a host of other information – from divination techniques to planting advice – were also extremely popular, and continue to be to this day. This page from a 2004 almanac lists, among other information, auspicious and inauspicious activities for each day – from seeking medical treatment, initiating a lawsuit and establishing a household to travelling and cutting hair. Source: Ji bao lou tongsheng baolou wanyou ling si jia shen nian [The All-Inclusive Jibao lou Almanac for ‘04/jia-shen year] (Guangdong: Jiangmen tuchan jinchukou youxian gongsi, 2004.)

Because of their applications in agriculture, commerce, local government and so on, almanacs and other popular devices for the reckoning of time tended to find as much, if not more, use in cyclical time measurements than in nian hao.  The “stem and branch” (ganzhi 干支) system is one of these.  Briefly put, this combines two ancient numerical systems -- the ten Heavenly Stems (tian gan 天干) and the twelve Earthly Branches (di zhi 地支) – to formulate a sexagesimal cycle.  These sixty permutations have been applied widely – to days, months and any variety of other items that can be counted in a cycle – but it is generally acknowledged that they were not applied to years until the Han dynasty.  Therefore current calendars that purport to count in sixty-year cycles all the way back to 2697 BC in the time of the (mythical) Yellow Emperor are in fact the results of modern interpellations – influenced, in fact, by Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries who wanted to trace a chronology for the Chinese people that did not have to depend on the imperial system.

Beginning in the Han, however, the sixty-year cycle began to be used in both official and unofficial ways – as a way to date publications, for instance, but also to measure the recurrence of religious festivals.  Thus stem-and-branch reckoning was a common feature of both almanacs and single-sheet calendars.  Other cyclical elements have long been incorporated into the Chinese calendar – seasonal days important in agriculture, for example, which are reckoned by movements of the sun and therefore technically make this a “lunisolar” calendar. 

Local life in China, then, could run on a number of simultaneous cycles:  periodic markets of differing size running on various permutations of the stem-and-branch system in days; religious observances that were celebrated every fifteen days, every year, every twelve years, and so on; family rituals that were observed according to the planting season; business practices that followed the lunar cycle; and of course for some, small changes in daily behavior as advised by a closely-followed almanac.

III:  Dual-system calendars, dual-system lives

Now the reasons behind a dual-system calendar begin to emerge more clearly.  Despite the Nationalist government’s best efforts to enforce the solar calendar, lunar-based holidays – including Chinese New Year – continued to shape social existence.  Not only did families continue to gather for lunar new year celebrations, but shopkeepers persisted in following the custom of settling the year’s accounts before that day, not January 1st.  At public schools, children were required to celebrate new civic holidays such as Sun Yat-sen’s birthday and the anniversary of the Republican revolution, but along with their families they may have still observed the winter and summer solstices, or recurring local temple festivals. Dual-system calendars therefore served as essential tools for negotiating a world in flux, and demand for continued unabated for these “subversive documents.”  The PRC government also vigorously attempted to eradicate the lunar calendar and its holidays, but both have reemerged since the reform era.  Dual-system calendars of various forms are still commonly printed in Chinese communities around the world today.

References:

Richard J. Smith. Chinese Almanacs.  Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1992. A good single-volume introduction to calendars and almanacs, with a focus on the latter, especially on changes the form and content have undergone during and after the Qing dynasty.

Henrietta Harrison. China. London: Arnold/ New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pages 158-161 and 200-201 describe various attempts to convert from the lunar to solar calendar during the early Republic.

For a useful summary of dating issues, see the “Notes” section of Stephen Hou’s dynasties and capitals site: http://web.mit.edu/shou/www/china/notes.html. A more detailed explanation of emperors and their names (including personal names as well as reign mottos) can be found at on the Chinaknowledge site: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/ -- look under “History”, then “Titles and Names.”

For more detail on the history and technical aspects of the Chinese calendar, consult “The Mathematics of the Chinese Calendar” by Helmer Aslaksen at the National University of Singapore (http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/calendar/chinese.shtml) and the useful Wikipedia article and associated topics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calendar. Donald K. Jordan of University of California, San Diego has a background essay on the calendar on his website, at http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/hbcalendar-u.html. 

Online Calendar Conversion Tools:

At the Chinese Historical GIS website http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/:  click on “search tools,” then  “calendars” for a tool that allows users to input Western years or ruler names and receive nian hao reign names.

Academia Sinica Computing Centre Chinese-Western Calendar Conversion Tool (中央研究院計算中心兩千年中西曆轉換工具)http://www.sinica.edu.tw/~tdbproj/sinocal/luso.html. Covers two thousand years (Chinese only.) Access from this link to second page with Western-Chinese conversion tool.

Western-Chinese Calendar Converter, Online Chinese Tools, http://www.mandarintools.com/calendar.html. Only covers 1912 onward, but gives date in several formats, in English/Romanization.

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