What Year Is It?

You can feel it in the air - children are anxious, adults are hurried, and the shops and streets are bustling.   Chinese New Year, the most important holiday in the Chinese world, is less than a week away. But didn’t we have a New Year celebration with fireworks and partying?  It is already 2013, so why is New Year being celebrated again in February?  Thanks to Wikipedia’s seemingly infinite knowledge, I have found the answers to these questions.

China has used a lunar calendar for thousands of years.  According to this traditional calendar, the solar equinox typically occurs during the 11^th month, while “new year” starts two months later.  It is all actually much more complicated than that since a truly lunar calendar would not contain the 365 ¼ days that it takes for a complete orbit around the sun, so adjustments have to be made.  The Gregorian calendar that we use also had lunar origins. Why else would months (the word month is actually derived from moon) have nearly the same number of days as a lunar cycle?  We have to adjust our calendar with leap years to average at 365 ¼ days a year. 

The Chinese eventually adopted the Gregorian calendar in modern times to conform to the rest of the world and to facilitate communication, trade, technology, and so forth.  While the Gregorian calendar may be used for official purposes, the traditional calendar was not discarded.  The Chinese lunar calendar is still used to schedule weddings, inform farmers about when to plant and harvest crops, and the celebration of holidays such as New Year, which is actually more accurately translated as “Spring Festival”.  

The topic of dueling calendars gets even more confusing when it comes to numbering years.  Traditionally, Chinese did not number their years as we do with the BC/AD system.  At some points in history years did become numbered using the beginning of the current ruling family as the starting point.  In China today, there is debate about what number to use, with various scholars referring to it as either 4709, 4649, or 4710 using the beginning of the Yellow Emperor’s reign as the starting point. 

Taiwan, often seeking a separate identity from its neighbor to the West, uses a different numbering system.  This was very confusing for me because I would often see the year listed as 101 and could not understand the significance of this number.  China is obviously thousands of years old and Taiwan was occupied by the Japanese until 1945, so couldn’t figure out the significance of 101. I assumed that this was part of the lunar calendar, but my confusion increased when the year changed from 101 to 102 on January 1^st, so it wasn’t lunar after all. Thanks again to Wikipedia for clearing up my cloudy historical thinking – settling on the island of Taiwan was not the significant event, it was the founding of the Republic of China by Sun Yat-Sen in 1911.  This event was the birth of what we now refer to as Taiwan, which, until recently, claimed control over the entire Chinese mainland.    

So to answer the title’s question, depending on how you reckon it and where you are located, the year is either about 4700, 2013, or 102 and the calendar will change on either January 1^st or February 9^th.  Clear as mud.