CALENDAR AND CONVENTIONS
Begin with the year, not a full chart
Learn the calendar language used by Synastry’s native Chinese lunar-year reading, with its limits and conventions kept visible.
Go deeper: the full reference
A guide you can read here
The website currently offers this educational guide. It does not calculate a Chinese year placement or a Four Pillars chart. In the native app, the year reader accepts a Gregorian civil date from 1901 through 2100 and reports the lunar date, year animal, Heavenly Stem, Earthly Branch, stem phase and Yin or Yang.
A civil-date convention
The native reader uses the Chinese calendar’s Lunar New Year boundary expressed as an Asia/Shanghai civil calendar date. It reads the entered date as a date and does not convert a birth instant between time zones. This convention should accompany comparisons near a year boundary.
A different question from BaZi
A year animal is one layer of a calendrical system. The native reader does not calculate solar-term month, day or hour pillars, luck cycles or a complete BaZi interpretation. Traditions using Li Chun can give a different year pillar between Li Chun and Lunar New Year.
Keep the calendar convention in view
The website offers these educational readings. Synastry’s native year reader uses a civil date and Lunar New Year; it is separate from a full Four Pillars or BaZi chart. Begin with the convention before comparing year labels.
Sources and conventions
These references identify the calendar or historical method used in this guide. Keep the named convention in view when comparing other traditions.
Hong Kong Observatory — Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Tables ↗ · Calendar reference covering 1901–2100, including leap months and cautions near midnight boundaries. The Synastry native reader uses its separately disclosed date-only Lunar New Year convention; this website provides the educational guide.
Connect the ideas
The calendar convention in this guide
A Chinese lunar-year reading from an entered Gregorian calendar date.
1 min readA lunisolar calendar
Chinese calendar months follow lunar phases while the year stays aligned with seasons.
1 min readThe Lunar New Year boundary
This calculator changes the year placement on the first day of the first lunar month.
1 min readThe sixty-year stem-branch cycle
Ten Heavenly Stems pair in order with twelve Earthly Branches to form sixty year names.
1 min read