Chinese New year starts on January 23rd, so get ready to welcome in the Year of the Dragon.
The traditional Chinese calendar is based on the Moon and the Sun, with the New Year celebrated at the second new moon after the winter solstice. Each year is named for an animal – legend has it that Buddha asked all the animals to meet him on Chinese New Year. Twelve actually came and Buddha named a year after each one. He announced that the people born in each animal’s year would have some of that animal’s personality.
Those born in dragon years are considered innovative, brave, and passionate. They include Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Salvador Dali, John Lennon and Bruce Lee. An additional five element cycle is superimposed on the 12 animal years – giving a 60 year complete cycle. 2012 is the year of the water dragon – last seen in 1952. Water is considered to calm the fiery nature of the Dragon – so water dragons are able to see things from other points of view.
According to traditional beliefs, some form of the calendar has been in use for almost five thousand years, although the archaeological evidence suggests it’s actually only been in use for three and a half thousand years. Almost every Chinese dynasty had its own calendar – with years counted for the duration of the reign. This also let astronomers make any needed adjustments to the calendar in order to match the sun and moon in the sky. The calendar was used to order the time to plant and harvest crops – based on the annual motion of the Sun.
In the Shang Dynasty – which is the 600 years from the 16th to 11th century BC, the calendar was based on the cycle of the moon. There were long (30 day) and short (29 day) months, with twelve months in a lunar year. The months are based on the 29 and a half days between new moons, but to make twelve months match the solar year, an extra week has to be added seven years out of nineteen. Our knowledge of this calendar system comes from the inscriptions on bones used for casting oracles. The bones also have records of solar eclipses, lunar eclipses and novae.
The days were recorded using a different system – the stem-branch system, which runs in a 60 day cycle. Each term in the cycle consists of two Chinese characters, one a term from a cycle of ten known as the Heavenly Stems and the second from a cycle of twelve known as the Earthly Branches. The first term combines the first heavenly stem with the first earthly branch. The second combines the second stem with the second branch, and so on, with day ten being tenth stem and tenth branch. Day eleven is then the first stem with the eleventh branch. This gives a total of 60 stem-branch combinations before the first stem-first branch combo repeats.
One side effect of the Year of the Dragon is the expectation of a baby boom in China. Over 15 million babies are expected to be born this year. The Year of the Dragon is an auspicious year – and based on the boom in 2000 (the last Dragon year), 5% more babies are expected. Yet, with the recent softening of the One-Child Policy allowing parents who are both only-children to have two kids, and rural couples with a daughter to have another child, there could be even more dragon newborns!
This episode of “What is the Stars?” was broadcast the week of January 23, 2012. Listen live on lyric fm on Mondays and Fridays at 22:45.
