URL originale : https://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/70313
The numerous aspects of the Chinese calendar
p. 645-648
Texte intégral
Poster and calendar seller, Beijing, 1936.

Excerpt from “Jietou wenhua”, Meishu shenghuo, 26, May 1936, p. 30, Illus. 7.)
A science and an everyday object
1Paradoxically, the most shared thing in the world is also the one that receives the least attention, and even worse since it is always destined to end in the dustbin of history. Let’s be more precise: it is not the calendar as the cosmological and astronomical theories of a particular civilization, which appears in the title of scholarly works such as the Babylonian calendar, the calendar of ancient Egypt, the calendar of the Romans, etc. No, it’s more prosaically the calendar object also called “annual calendar,” the one we use daily, essential to find our bearings in time, to celebrate annual festivals and birthdays; arrange our schedule, make an appointment (and forget it!) remember the activities of the past days… Combining memory and anticipation, past and future, it is obviously the result of sophisticated calculations, scrupulous observation of the stars, a complex apparatus taking into account the cycle of the sun, the moon, the precession of the equinoxes, a kind of “deep structure” of which it is only the “surface structure,” as Jean-Claude Martzloff says. But the average user does not need to have detailed knowledge of this: just like any technical object, such as a computer or a calculator, using a calendar requires no special expertise.
Highs and lows of the calendar
2That may be one reason that leads irrevocably, with exceptions, to scrapping the calendar at the end of the year: it ends up in a trash can or covered in dust on a forgotten shelf; or, as in Asia, it is used as packaging, soles (Illus. 1), buttresses for votive images, so true is it that the technical object is inherently doomed to be replaced and to disappear. It is therefore not surprising that there remain very few calendars: some calendars engraved on stone from Ancient Rome, a Gaulish calendar engraved on a bronze plaque (ca second century AD), the late copy of a private calendar written in 354 in Rome…
3However, the situation is different for the Chinese calendar. The first calendars, dated a few centuries BC, have been found in the tombs of local officials, who took with them “beyond life” what appears to be their library: written on strips of bamboo or wooden planks, the calendars stand alongside mathematical treatises, codes of law, philosophical and religious texts; and especially the famous Rishu 日書 (books of days), a kind of hemerological divination textbooks presenting various methods to determine, based on days, the auspicious or harmful nature of many activities, and thus required the use of a calendar. They were also excavated from pits located on the western margins of the empire where-for reasons still unknown-were buried thousands of documents, most frequently of an administrative nature.
Illus. 1: Partial calendar from the year 630, cut in the shape of a shoe sole

Xinjiang, Turfan, Astana.
4Used for almost six centuries, from the third century BC to the third century AD, bamboo and wood gave way to the paper as support material. Then we see, emerging around the fifth century, some calendars on paper, which will be followed by many others found on the Silk Road, respectively buried in a pit and in a walled grottoe in Turfan (seventh to eighth century) and Dunhuang (ninth-tenth century); but also in Japan (seventh to eighth century); in Karakhoto among the Tangut (eleventh-thirteenth century) who have used movable type to print them, before libraries and collectors ended up playing their “custodian” role, more or less effectively, starting from the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644).
From a basic calendar to a hemerological calendar
5On this very long period, it’s not so much the material change—from bamboo to paper—, nor the proliferation of astronomical data (cycle of the moon, sunrise and sunset, etc.), nor really the beginning of Chinese printing (Illus. 2), but rather the inclusion in the calendar of activities during the seventh century which contributed to a major shift in the nature, role and use of the Chinese calendar.
Illus. 2: Calendar-almanac for the year 877 found in Dunhuang, Gansu.

It is one of the first Chinese printed documents Upper register: details of the 7th and 8th months; Lower register: various divinatory methods, including the method related to the 12 cyclical animals.
© Collection A. Stein, British Library.
6The first calendars around the current era had a relatively rudimentary shape (Illus. 3): a complete exposure of months and days, a few astronomical (equinoxes and solstices) and hemerological (the “spirits” that determine the auspicious or harmful quality of the cycles of time) informations. If, as we have noted, they were necessarily complementary to the “books of days,” their discovery in the tombs of local officials diaries also plead for an administrative use. In the gap left empty between days appear sporadically retrospective notations of the deceased, about his travels, his places of residence, money, weather phenomena, his health problems (Illus. 4)… Were they then used as a basis for writing reports to the hierarchy?
Illus. 3: Calendar for the year 134BC (partial transcription).

Months are written vertically in the right-most strip, days are written in front of each month, horizontally, on the adjacent strips (“n” followed by a number is a match for the numbering system using the 60 sexagesimal pairs). The first day of the tenth month is paired with the number 26 (jichou 己丑), the second is paired with the number 27 (gengyin 庚寅), etc.
7Around the seventh century, including auspicious activities day after day did not only allow to save money on hemerological manuals, but more importantly created an object with a wider readership than the political and administrative elites. There is indeed a true anthology and an endless inventory of hundreds of activities that we find in the calendars of the ninth to the tenth century (Illus. 5), found in Dunhuang, the crossroads between Central Asia and China.
Illus. 4: Calendar for the year 11BC, Yinwan Tomb, Jiangsu.

This locations, journeys, etc.
8Grouped into categories, they relate, in order of importance, between 10 and 25%, to construction activities (building a house, setting a ridge beam, manufacturing doors and carriage, digging a hole, drilling a well; repairing latrines, warehouses or millstones; knocking down a house, a wall, a partition, etc.), ritual activities (practicing an exorcism, delivering, securing; making sacrifices and offerings, thanksgiving, etc.) and funeral activities (burying, placing in the coffin, cutting grass off graves, putting mourning clothes, etc.); between 5 and 10% those related to medicine (curing diseases, taking medication), domestic activities (cutting out clothes, making the bed, sweeping one’s home) and commercial ones (buying slaves and domestic animals); and, finally, less than 5%, agricultural activities (planting and transplanting, cutting trees, opening irrigation canals, making alcoholic beverages), official activities (being appointed to a position, being promoted, etc.), weddings (contracting a marriage, marrying, presenting the dowry), body care (washing the body and head, cutting fingernails and toenails, removing white hair), movements (moving, travelling, going home), education (entering school, educating oneself). As surrealist as they may seem, those activities theoretically involved everyone and, in a way, though they are not a true reflection of Chinese society at the time, they contribute to in-form the reader of the calendar of events-in the uninterrupted flow of daily business-that must be considered as decisive, since they were carrying auspicious or harmful values for the future.
Calendar, power and economy
9Producing, printing and distributing the calendar were, from the Tang Dynasty (618–907), claimed to be the exclusive prerogative of the Chinese government, in particular the Department of Astronomy as regards its development. The stakes are both political-to maintain the unity of the empire-and economic: the sale of hundreds of thousands of calendars represented a modest yet significant income (for example, around the fourteenth century, official production of calendars amounted to more than three million copies). But the appearance at regular interval of reports from administrators and inserts on the calendar’s cover (Illus. 6), citing the rule again and warning counterfeiters and fraudsters, shows on the other hand that the imperial privilege was shamelessly ignored. Sometimes this was due to a loosening of the ties between the center and the periphery, such as Dunhuang where a local office produced a calendar which differed from the official one (difference of a day or two, errors in the era names of the dynasty, etc.). But it was private workshops which, starting from the tenth century, would be breaking the monopoly and lead a few centuries later, around the late Ming, to real companies specializing in calendars and almanacs. Mass production calendars and the need to distribute them quickly over a large area in a relatively short period of time-the passage of the New Year-had led them to organize in branches associated with the parent company by a licensing system.
Illus. 5: Calendar for the year 834 found in Dunhuang, Gansu.

Details for the first lunar month: on the upper register, the days; on the lower register, the spirits of those days and the auspicious activities, among which one can find (column for the first day): being promoted, marrying, entering school, travelling, repairing one’s house, the millstone, the pit latrine, planting seeds…
© Collection Paul Pelliot, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
From liturgy to day off
10If the hemerological idiosyncrasy of the Chinese calendar—to which should be added its cousins in the sinicized world (Korea, Japan, Vietnam)—is obvious, let us remember that this is not true for its Western alter ego which, from the Middle Ages to the present, focuses on saints’ days and important religious ceremonies. The vast majority of the festivities that the former mentions is a duplicate at the local level of rituals made at the capital: Prime plowing, a ritual of opening field work sponsored by the Emperor, sacrifice to the Sources and rivers, worship of the god of Earth, the offering to the Founders (Confucius and his followers), etc. Apart from the New Year festival, it does not show folk festivals, even less major Buddhist and Taoist dates. Paradoxically, it is the State of the New China which, in search of modernity, has very recently introduced in the calendar three traditional festivals, days which have now become public holidays: the commemoration of the dead (Qingming, 5 April), the festival of Duanwu (the fifth month of the fifth lunar month, a kind of celebration to ward off the coming of hot weather with their share of diseases and epidemics), and the mid-Autumn Festival (the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, a substitute of a distant worship to the moon), officially reinterpreted to remove their “superstitious” components.
Illus. 6: Cover of the official 1635 calendar.

The right sidebar warned that it had been produced by the Imperial Department of Astronomy and that “fraudsters would be punished, according to law, by being beheaded. Those who would have facilitated their arrest would be rewarded 50 silver ounces by the civil servants. If it did not bear the genuine seal of calendars from this Department, it would then be identical to the private calendar”.
© Bibliothèque nationale Chine.
Sociology of the calendar
11A sociological survey on the use of the traditional calendar was conducted in the 1980s in Taiwan. It reveals that over 80% of households own at least one and 56% will consult it to see “the quality of days.” Of the 15 activities retaining the attention of users, 10 are predominantly identified by using the calendar: there are related in particular to sickness, the direction to take when leaving home at New Year, business activities, the opening of a store, the localization of the fetus spirit for pregnant women; the rest are spread between resorting to specialists (starting work, the topological location of the office and the home) and consulting deities (day at sea for fishermen).
12Since the years 1990–2000, the calendar-almanac is back on the Continent. First imported from Hong Kong and Taiwan, we recently observed a modest but real local production (Illus. 7) which takes advantage of the loosening spaces of the control on publication. It would be very instructive to carry on the Continent a comparable investigation to the one conducted in Taiwan.
Illus. 7: Traditional 1999 calendar, know as the “calendar of the Li Fusheng Stars” Watchtower
李復生”, printed in Hunan.

From top to bottom: the western calendar (from February 16 to March 1), the week days, the days’ spirits, the Chinese calendar (from the 1st day to the 14th day of the first lunar month), auspicious and harmful activities; last register: other days’ spirits, gods’ birthdays (deified Laozi, Lord Yang).
© Personal collection.
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