Chinese New Year is the festival celebrating the beginning of a new year on lunisolar Chinese calendar: the first day of the first new moon after January 21st.
How did the Chinese calendar come to be?
The traditional Chinese calendar was first seen scratched in oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty over 3000 years ago. Since then, many a dynasty have revised and made their own version.
The last traditional calendar before China adopted the Gregorian calendar at the beginning of the 20th century stems from the Qing dynasty, a calendar created and developed by a German Jesuit priests.
Known as the Chongzhen calendar, advisor to the emperor Johann Adam Schall von Bell and Johann Schreck, both missionaries from Germany, were tasked with working out a new calendar based on Western astronomical arithmetic.
von Bell submitted the calendar to the Shunzhi Emperor early in the Qing dynasty, which was issued by the government as the seasonal calendar in 1644.
This calendar, also known as the Han calendar, was the official Chinese calendar until 1912 when it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar.
However, the Han calendar remains culturally essential.
“For example, most of the traditional festivals, such as Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival, occur on new moons or full moons. The Han calendar, as an element of traditional culture, has much cultural and nationalistic sentiment invested in it. The Han calendar is still used in the more traditional Chinese households around the world to pick ‘auspicious dates’ for important events such as weddings, funerals, and business deals. A special calendar is used for this purpose, called the Imperial Calendar, which contains auspicious activities, times, and directions for each day.”
In 1992, Taiwan issued a commemorative stamp for the 400th anniversary of Schall von Bell’s birth, saying “with all his accomplishments his place in Chinese history is secure.”
In 2013, Chinese CCTV published a documentary on Schall von Bell, as part of its series Biographies, saying that the Chongzhen calendar edited by Schall von Bell is still in use today.
Happy Chinese New Year! š²š§§š¹
