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day no one should take a bath or bury the dead. However, on another it might be an auspicious day for a head shave but a bad day for starting the construction of a house. It was referred to by Couling in his Encyclopaedia Sinica as the Calendar of Superstitions. It does not take much imagination to realize that such a calendar has to be accurate as every movement of the stars influences human destiny, from birth to death, through marriage, travel and business and any error in calculating the calendar would make the whole meaningless.
Since remote antiquity Chinese have recorded each individual year by pairs of characters. These are a combination taken from two sets, one of twelve characters and the other of ten, producing a cycle of sixty pairs, with the individual pairs identifying the year of an event or the age of a person. The sixty-year cycles consist of sixty possible combinations of individual characters, one from the ten stems [tiangan] and the other from the twelve branches [dizhi]; beginning with the first of the branches, Jia, and the first of the stems, Zi, together forming a combination for the first year of the sixty, Jia Zi. Each successive year has another pair designating it for the whole sexagenary cycle when the combination begins again. The "branches" were originally used to designate successive days; however, since the Han they have been used in combinations for successive years. A second separate system used reign periods to mark events.
Also within that sixty year repetitive cycle each individual year, with the five sequences of twelve years, was known, not only by the combination of stem and branch but also, for simplicity, by the animal of the year. Thus, the year 2000 is the Gengchen year as well as being the year of the Dragon. 1988 was and 2012 will also be the year of the Dragon but neither will be Gengchen years as this only comes round once every sixty years. For example, the Gengchen year 1940 was sixty years earlier than the Gengchen year 2000 with the next Gengchen year being 2060. Sixty years of age, a full cycle, used to be regarded as a good old age, and any years of life thereafter were regarded as a blessing and a bonus.
Should the average Chinese be asked about a specific happening in the past he would reply that it happened 'several moons [months] ago,' or 'several years ago,' and often when discussing historical happenings the response would be a round figure of a thousand or two
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day no one should take a bath or bury the dead. However, on another it might be a auspicious day for a head shave but a bad day for starting the construction of a house. It was referred to by Couling in his Encyclopaedia Sinica as the Calendar of Superstitions. It does not take much imagination to realize that such a calendar has to be accurate as every movement of the stars influences human destiny, from birth to death, through marriage, travel and business and any error in calculating the calendar would make the whole meaningless.
Since remote antiquity Chinese have recorded each individual year by pairs of characters. These are a combination taken from two sets, one of twelve characters and the other of ten, producing a cycle of sixty pairs, with the individual pairs identifying the year of an event or the age of a person. The sixty-year cycles consist of sixty possible combinations of individual characters, one from the ten stems [tiangan XT] and the other from the twelve branches [dizhi ]; beginning with the first of the branches, Jia, and the first of the stems, Zi, together forming a combination for the first year of the sixty, Jia Zi. Each successive year has another pair designating it for the whole sexagenary cycle when the combination begins again." The "branches" were originally used to designate successive days; however, since the Han they have been used in combinations for successive years. A second separate system used reign periods to mark events.
Also within that sixty year repetitive cycle each individual year, with the five sequences of twelve years, was known, not only by the combination of stem and branch but also, for simplicity, by the animal of the year. Thus, the year 2000 is the Gengchen year as well as being the year of the Dragon. 1988 was and 2012 will also be the year of the Dragon but neither will be Gengchen years as this only comes round once every sixty years. For example, the Gongchen year 1940 was sixty years earlier that the Gongchen year 2000 with the next Gongchen year being 2060. Sixty years of age, a full cycle, used to be regarded as a good old age, and any years of life thereafter were regarded as a blessing and a bonus.
Should the average Chinese be asked about a specific happening in the past he would reply that it happened 'several moons [months] ago,' or 'several years ago,' and often when discussing historical happenings the response would be a round figure of a thousand or two
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