page_title: Chinese New Year
section_title: Dates in Chinese lunisolar calendar
hierarchical_section_title: Chinese New Year / Dates in Chinese lunisolar calendar
caption_attribution_description: On Chinese New Year's Eve in Meizhou. Fireworks are set off to ward off the bad spirits from the previous year and welcome the new year in. Candles and incense are also lighted during prayers, like this scene on Chinese New Year's Eve.
context_page_description: Chinese New Year is the Chinese festival that celebrates the beginning of a new year on the traditional Chinese calendar or lunar calendar. The festival is commonly referred to as the Spring Festival in China as the spring season in the lunisolar calendar traditionally starts with lichun, the first of the twenty-four solar terms which the festival celebrates around the time of. Marking the end of winter and the beginning of the spring season, observances traditionally take place from New Year’s Eve, the evening preceding the first day of the year to the Lantern Festival, held on the 15th day of the year. The first day of Chinese New Year begins on the new moon that appears between 21 January and 20 February. In 2021, the first day of the Chinese New Year will be on Friday, 12 February, which is the Year of the Ox
  Chinese New Year is one of the most important holidays in China, and has strongly influenced Lunar New Year celebrations such as the Losar of Tibet and of China's neighbouring cultures, including the Korean New Year, and the Tết of Vietnam.
context_section_description: The lunisolar Chinese calendar determines the date of Lunar New Year. The calendar is also used in countries that have been influenced by, or have relations with, China – such as Korea, Japan and Vietnam, though occasionally the date celebrated may differ by one day or even one moon cycle due to using a meridian based on a different capital city in a different time zone or different placements of intercalary months.
  Chinese calendar defines the lunar month with winter solstice as the 11th month, which means that Chinese New Year usually falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice (rarely the third if an intercalary month intervenes). In more than 96% of the years, the Chinese New Year's Day is the closest date to a new moon to lichun (Chinese: 立春; "start of spring") on 4 or 5 February, and the first new moon after Dahan (Chinese: 大寒; "major cold"). In the Gregorian calendar, the Lunar New Year begins at the new moon that falls between 21 January and 20 February. To determine whether a year has an intercalary month, one only needs to check whether Chinese New Year is within the month of January.
  The Gregorian Calendar dates for Chinese New Year from 1912 to 2101 are below, along with the year's presiding animal zodiac and its Stem-branch. The traditional Chinese calendar follows a Metonic cycle, a system used by the modern Jewish Calendar, and returns to the same date in Gregorian calendar roughly. The names of the Earthly Branches have no English counterparts and are not the Chinese translations of the animals. Alongside the 12-year cycle of the animal zodiac there is a 10-year cycle of heavenly stems. Each of the ten heavenly stems is associated with one of the five elements of Chinese astrology, namely: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. The elements are rotated every two years while a yin and yang association alternates every year. The elements are thus distinguished: Yang Wood, Yin Wood, Yang Fire, Yin Fire, etc. These produce a combined cycle that repeats every 60 years. For example, the year of the Yang Fire Rat occurred in 1936 and in 1996, 60 years apart.
  Many people inaccurately calculate their Chinese birth-year by converting it from their Gregorian birth-year. As the Chinese New Year starts in late January to mid-February, the previous Chinese year dates through 1 January until that day in the new Gregorian year, remaining unchanged from the previous Gregorian year. For example, the 2011 year of the Rabbit began on 3 February 2011 . The year 2011 is generally aligned with the year of the Rabbit. However, the 2010 year of the Tiger officially ended on 2 February 2011 . This means that anyone born from 14 February 2010 to 2 February 2011 was actually born in the year of the Tiger rather than the year of the Rabbit. Many online Chinese Sign calculators do not account for the non-alignment of the two calendars, using Gregorian-calendar years rather than official Chinese New Year dates.
  One scheme of continuously-numbered Chinese calendar years assigns 4709 to the year beginning in 2011, but this is not universally accepted; the calendar is traditionally cyclical, not continuously numbered.
  Although the Chinese calendar traditionally does not use continuously numbered years, outside China its years are sometimes numbered from the purported reign of the mythical Yellow Emperor in the 3rd millennium BC. But at least three different years numbered 1 are now used by various scholars, making the year beginning CE 2015 the "Chinese year" 4712, 4713, or 4652.
caption: Chinese New Year eve in Meizhou on 8 February 2005.
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