Chinese calendar
Pick a date and this says which Chinese year it falls in — with the animal and the stem-branch name given separately, because they do not change on the same day. The animal turns at Chinese New Year. The stem-branch year, which is what feng shui and the almanac count from, turns at the beginning of spring, a solar term that is not always 4 February.
How to use this tool
- What you need
- A date. Nothing else, and nothing is sent anywhere.
- How to use it
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- Pick any date from 1900 to 2100.
- Read the animal year and the stem-branch year separately.
- Check the two boundary dates below them to see how far the date sits from each.
- Use this when
Why there are two answers
Every year there is a stretch of days where the two counts disagree, and the width of it changes from year to year. When the beginning of spring comes first, a date in that gap is already in the new stem-branch year while the animal is still the old one. When Chinese New Year comes first, it is the other way round.
This matters for anything worked out from a birth date. A Kua number is taken from the stem-branch year, so someone born in that gap gets a different number depending on which boundary was used — which is why the Kua number calculator here uses the beginning of spring and says so. The full argument is in when does the Chinese year actually start, and the January case has its own piece in born in January, which year counts.
Where these dates come from
Both boundaries are computed at build time for every year from 1900 to 2100 and shipped as a table, so this page does no astronomy in your browser and makes no network request. The beginning of spring is a real solar term with a time of day, not a fixed calendar date — it lands on 3, 4 or 5 February depending on the year, and how often it is not the 4th is worth knowing if you have seen it written as a fixed date elsewhere.
The stem-branch name is worked out from the year number rather than looked up, so it can be checked: ten stems and twelve branches advance together and repeat every sixty years, and the cycle number shown with each year is its place in that sixty.
What this does not tell you
This is a calendar lookup, not a reading. It gives the year's name, its element and its animal, and it takes no position on what any of that means for a person born in it. The placement work on this site runs Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai), which uses the year only to get a Kua number; the annual directions the almanac marks out are a separate layer, and they are in the Tai Sui directions tool.