Almanac · Guide
How to read the almanac
A Chinese almanac is a calendar with a layer of annotation laid over it: what kind of day it is, what the day is said to suit, and which solar term it sits between. This page takes each field the almanac page prints in turn, explains where the value comes from, and says how much weight it can carry.
Nothing is cast here
The almanac is the one tool on this site that does not divine anything. It takes a civil date you choose, converts it with a real calendar implementation, and prints the fields a printed almanac would carry for that day. Every value below is derived at the moment you ask for it rather than looked up in a book, which is why the page can answer for any date you give it instead of only for this year.
The lunar date, and the animal
The head of the reading gives the lunar date in Chinese and in English, together with the animal of the lunar year. The weekday is there too, because a lunar date is not much use if you cannot place it in the week you are actually living in. The week strip below the reading repeats the seven days from the chosen date, each with its officer and its day pair, and clicking one reads that day in full.
The Four Pillars
Chinese calendrics names a moment with four pairs, called pillars: one for the year, one for the month, one for the day and one for the hour. Each pair is one of ten stems set against one of twelve branches, which produces a cycle of sixty that repeats without modification. Every date you will ever meet is somewhere in that same sixty, counted round again.
A pillar is a label rather than a verdict. 丙午 names a day the way Wednesday names a day: it tells you where you are in the cycle, and the cycle itself is indifferent to what you do with it.
The almanac shows three of the four — year, month and day. An hour pillar belongs to an hour, and a whole day does not have one, so printing it would be inventing a value. Cast a moment instead and all four appear: the Xiao Liu Ren result prints the full set, because a cast happens at a time rather than on a date. The day's own pair is repeated on its own further down and again under each day in the week strip, since it is the one people quote — a day is 乙亥, and sixty days later it is 乙亥 again.
The day officer
Every day also carries one of twelve officers (建除十二神), running 建 除 满 平 定 执 破 危 成 收 开 闭. The rule is arithmetic. The day whose branch matches the month's branch is 建, and every following day moves one place along the sequence; since both cycles are twelve long, the same officer returns every twelve days.
The site derives the officer itself rather than reading it out of the calendar library, and then compares the two over a long span of dates in its test suite. That comparison is the point of doing it twice: an almanac that is quietly wrong about an officer would look exactly like an almanac that is right, and nothing in the interface would ever say so.
The coloured word beside the officer — open, steady, held or closed — is this site's own grouping, offered so that a glance is enough. The twelve, with their traditional descriptions, are set out in full on the officers page.
Suitable and avoid
Below the officer sit two columns: 宜, what the day is said to suit, and 忌, what it is said to avoid. The entries are traditional activity names — make offerings to ancestors, open a granary, raise the roof beam, break ground — and every one is translated, because half a page of Chinese helps nobody who arrived in English. Across sixteen years of days the calendar engine emits 114 distinct terms, and a test sweeps that whole range and fails if a term ever appears with no translation behind it.
Read the two columns as convention rather than mechanism. Published almanacs disagree with one another on these lists, sometimes about the same day, and the disagreement is not a bug in any of them: they follow different schools of compilation. Where one side of the page has nothing to list, the site says so rather than leaving a column blank and letting you guess what a blank means.
Solar terms
The twenty-four solar terms divide the year by the sun's position rather than the moon's. They matter here for two reasons. First, they bound the lunar month and anchor the month pillar, so the term a date falls inside is part of how that date is named at all. Second, they are what most people actually want from an almanac: the reading prints the previous term and the next one with their dates, and marks the day with a badge when the date you are looking at is itself a term.
Two dates rather than a list of twenty-four is deliberate. The question the page answers is where in the year this day sits, and the nearest term on each side answers it in one glance.
The small print
Under the columns sit the remaining fields: the branch and animal the day clashes with, the direction to avoid, and — at the head, beside the pillars — an element badge. That element belongs to the day's lunar mansion, one of the twenty-eight, which the small print below names; it is not something the day's own stem and branch decides. All three are vocabulary from the same tradition as the rest of the page, and none of them is an instruction.
How much weight to give it
An almanac is a cultural convention, closer to a calendar of feast days than to a forecast. Its officer names a kind of day; its lists record what the tradition associated with that kind of day. Neither knows what you are doing today, and neither has any way of finding out.
That leaves plenty of honest use: a pause in the morning, a vocabulary for describing what a day felt like, a way of marking time that is older than the week. What it is not is a permission structure. No line in an almanac should decide a medical appointment, a contract or a payment, and nothing on this site is medical, legal or financial advice.
Where to go next
Read today's almanac — every field described above, for any date you pick. The twelve day officers takes the twelve in order, with what each one is traditionally taken to favour. The companion guides cover the site's other traditions: what Xiao Liu Ren is and how to cast the coin oracle.